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Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Anthony Carrigan in Death of a Unicorn.
High-concept movies can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, a film that has a striking and easily communicable idea is easy to sell, both to studios and the moviegoing public. On the other hand, those ideas tend to be very surface level, making it difficult to turn the great idea into a story worth watching for 90 minutes or longer.
The concept of Death of a Unicornis easy to understand: Father and daughter Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) are on their way to the remote home of billionaire Odell (Richard E. Grant) when they accidentally strike and kill a unicorn. Instead of leaving it on the road, they take it with them, the first of many poor decisions by the film’s characters.
The group gathered at the home — including Odell’s wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni); son Shepard (Will Poulter), and butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan) — discover that the unicorn’s blood has great healing powers. With money on their minds, Odell and his family look to capitalize on this discovery, not anticipating that the parents of the clearly young unicorn will come looking for it — and revenge.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Alex Scharfman, the film is most notable for its off-the-wall humor. The greed of Odell, Belinda, and Shepard leads them down some clueless roads, especially once the adult unicorns show up. Their unexpected dialogue, along with the bloody rampage that ensues, delivers some memorably funny moments.
The trouble is, a film needs to be more than just moments, and in-between those scenes there’s little that keeps the film interesting. Elliott is a lawyer who originally came to deal with the estate of the dying Odell, but once that plot point becomes moot, so too does his character. Ridley develops a connection with the unicorns, but the character’s most compelling trait is her compulsive use of a vape, a joke that doesn’t wear well.
It’s not easy to ascribe meaning to non-talking mythical creatures, but even so, the film does a poor job at making anyone care about the unicorns. The adults are simply used as props with murderous intentions, with their horns being far from the only deadly element available to them. The story seems to be a slight allegory about man’s mistreatment of nature, but it would have been nice to find out more information about the unicorns than what is given.
It’s a shame that the story is mostly uninteresting as the film features a killer cast. Rudd is a comedy go-to who finds gold in even bad situations, while Ortega has developed into a reliable star, even if she has little to do here. Grant, Leoni, and Poulter all chew the scenery entertainingly, and Carrigan — one of the best actors on the HBO show Barry — gives a dry performance that elevates every scene he’s in.
There is lots of mayhem in Death of a Unicorn, but Scharfman seems content to let the violence be for violence’s sake instead of making us care about those being killed or the creatures doing the killing. There’s room for that kind of storytelling, but it needs to be done in a much better way than it is here.
