Death of a Unicorn Offers Up Amusing, Familiar Impale-the-Rich Cinema
“Do you think it’s endangered?”
That’s one of the first questions out of nebbish attorney Elliot Kinter’s (Paul Rudd) mouth as he studies the body of the strange-looking horse he’s just fatally maimed with his car on a winding Canadian mountain road. Elliot and his aloof daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) are en route to a business meeting at the opulent estate of long-standing clients when the accident occurs—a violent collision that sends their car skidding across the asphalt and leaves the peculiar creature spilling blue blood onto the pavement. Ridley quickly senses the mystical nature of the animal, resting her hand on its protruding horn and experiencing a psychedelic vision of comfort and truth, a fleeting glimpse of paradise. That is, until Elliot bludgeons its head in with a tire iron—an act of mercy that brutally shatters the creature’s transcendence with each sudden, bloody strike. This ethereal animal is endangered, its demise an inevitability in the face of human intrusion.
This central theme of pristine nature under threat serves as the driving thesis of Alex Scharfman’s debut feature, the Ari Aster-produced Death of a Unicorn, a film that wields its critique of unfettered wealth, capitalistic opportunism, and human ignorance like a blunt instrument. Unsure what else to do with the corpse, Elliot stuffs the unicorn into the back of the car and continues up the road. As fate would have it, the family they’re visiting—the Leopolds—have built their fortune in pharmaceuticals, making them the perfect candidates to exploit an animal whose DNA, it soon becomes clear, may possess extraordinary healing properties. This isn’t just an undiscovered species. “It’s a fucking unicorn,” Ridley states, as the adults around her desperately try to rationalize the creature’s existence.
Ridley acts as both the film’s moral compass and the harbinger of inevitable disaster, her psychic connection to the unicorn intensifying her unease as she watches the industrialists around her salivate over the creature’s blood and flesh. Already sharp-tongued and socially conscious—casually declaring that “philanthropy is reputation laundering for the oligarchy”—Ridley was always primed for friction with the Leopolds (and played with that familiar glowering angst that Ortega has been typecast into). But the unicorn’s death sends her into overdrive, amplifying her disgust as the family maneuvers to hoard the creature’s miraculous properties for themselves.
The film builds on this interpersonal tension for much of its first half, steeping itself in satirical power struggles as it steadily raises the stakes. The turning point comes when ailing family patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) begins to show signs of recovery after exposure to the unicorn, his cancer symptoms seemingly fading. He, his calculating wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and their blowhard son Shepard (Will Poulter) waste no time rallying their personal team of scientists to crack the unicorn’s genetic code. Even when they acknowledge the creature’s scarcity, the Leopolds remain fixated on legacy-building: “Let’s prioritize anyone that’s had a public health scare,” Belinda suggests, framing their self-serving agenda as altruism. Elliot, torn between his daughter’s ethical pleas and the allure of financial security, is left to navigate the wreckage of his own guilt and grief.
Death of a Unicorn has a fun, if familiar, tenor to the overarching tone, fitting neatly into the recent trend of dark, comedic class critiques that resonate in an era of growing wealth disparity driven by a shameless ruling class. Although it doesn’t necessarily stand out from others in the genre beyond its magical premise, it boasts a strong ensemble and plenty of amusing punchlines. If its societal critiques echo those of similar films, Death of a Unicorn at least complicates its ensemble dynamic by exploring the motives of its various hierarchical characters, such as Elliot’s potential succumbing to the enticing riches on the other side of this long night, with Rudd in a great position to manipulate his affable everyman persona into someone with the capacity to be manipulated by immoral forces if it means stability for him and his daughter. Along the ride for more sustained emphasis and comedic purposes than anything else is Griff, the Leopolds’ butler in a welcome role for Barry’s Anthony Carrigan, carrying over some recognizable elements from his nutty and expressive performance as NoHo Hank, and who has to bear the brunt of the Leopolds’ dehumanization of anyone with less money and influence than themselves. Scharfman’s acerbic script and the luxurious single-location mansion setting should immediately recall analogous films like The Menu and Ready or Not, particularly as Death of a Unicorn eventually veers into grisly violence.
As it would turn out, there’s more than one unicorn out in the Canadian wilderness, and soon our cast finds themselves besieged by a line-up of increasingly alpha unicorns who are there to brutally maim, impale, and otherwise exterminate these feckless humans. This is a natural escalation that makes for a number of admirably gruesome deaths and some fruitful horror imagery, essentially transitioning from supernatural dark comedy to full-blown creature feature. The logline of a group of people being terrorized by unicorns may sound a little esoteric for a broad audience, but in practice the second half of Death of a Unicorn feels like a Jurassic Park movie in spirit, as characters attempt to sneak by or outrun incredible animals that want to butcher them (fitting, as Leoni can also be found in Jurassic Park III).
Of course, like every other director that tried to make a Jurassic Park movie after Steven Spielberg, Scharfman is mostly indebted to the iconic imagery and sequences of suspense from that movie, never rising above something that feels like a collection of influences or like something that will endure on its own accord. It lacks a certain finesse in the staging and construction of its stealth and chase sequences that run through the varied halls of this manor and out on its grounds, despite reliably sharp shooting from cinematographer Larry Fong. Plus, watching a group of CG unicorns tramp around the place can only feel so tactile at the end of the day, and the lack of true tension makes this feel like a film that never fully reconciles its dual personalities as a horror-comedy.
Still, it turns out there’s a satisfying sense of schadenfreudian indulgence to watching a group of rich assholes get what’s coming to them in a world where that increasingly doesn’t happen. Death of a Unicorn may not be much more than another peg in an era of eat-the-rich cinema that has certainly become oversaturated in this form, yet time and time again its reflection of our times feels befitting. Maybe it’s just nice to see a different category of species hit the endangered list for a change.
Director: Alex Scharfman
Writer: Alex Scharfman
Stars: Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Carrigan, Sunita Mani
Release date: March 28, 2025
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.