Death of a Unicorn Is 5 Pounds of Purple Poop In a 10-Pound Bag

Fantasy-creature gore may be a funny spectacle, but it’s not enough to hang a whole movie on. Photo: Murray Close/A24

The rich having been looking enormously appetizing lately, so you have to really fuck up for your movie about eating them to feel unsatisfying. But so it goes with Death of a Unicorn, an upcoming horror comedy that dipped by the SXSW Film Festival for a premiere ahead of its theatrical release on March 28. Its antagonists are the Leopolds, a trio whose extensive holdings come courtesy of the pharma industry, for added villainy. Patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) is relentlessly imperious despite his terminal cancer, while his wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni), is consumed with using their charitable foundation to launder their reputation, and their only child, Shepard (Will Poulter), is your standard failson with substance-abuse issues. Aside from these family roles, they’re written so broadly, all identically manipulative and sneeringly self-serving, that it renders their characterizations toothless. Even in a new age of oligarchy where the rich are openly proclaiming themselves above the needs and laws of normal people, and even with obvious parallels to the Sacklers, the Leopolds manage to be generically monstrous instead of resonantly so.

You could argue that the real target of the film, which is the debut of writer-director Alex Scharfman, is Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd), who works for the Leopolds as their VP of ethical compliance. Elliot, a widower, wants to attain a fraction of the Leopolds’ untouchable status so badly that he’s devoted his life to toadying up to them at the expense of his relationship with his now-undergrad daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega). He’s dragged Ridley along with him to a weekend at the Leopolds’ palatial lodge in the Canadian wilderness to kiss the ring and, more importantly, to secure a spot on their board. Rudd plays Elliot as a man whose denial about what he’s doing is so deep as to be almost dissociative, his face continually flashing consternation that then gets smoothed over into placid obsequiousness before anyone notices, but even he’s depressingly one note. The big hook of Death of a Unicorn in there in its title — while driving through the wilderness preserve on the way to the lodge, Elliot hits one of the apparently non-mythical creatures, though no one else but Ridley is willing to initially acknowledge what it is. The legendary animal’s body turns out to have healing properties, which is handy for Odell, who’s soon no longer dying. He becomes giddy about how to exploit this roadkill windfall, though the unicorn also inconveniently has parents who are bigger and considerably more bloodthirsty, and who quickly come calling in search of their child.

There’s enough material for a rollicking 25-minute short in Death of a Unicorn, which unfortunately spreads its goods out over the stretch of a feature. The terrific cast, which also includes Barry’s Anthony Carrigan and Spaced’s Jessica Hynes as the long-suffering house staff, and Sunita Mani and Steve Park as scientists summoned to examine the unicorn, is good enough to sustain the movie’s momentum for longer than it merits. But by its midpoint, Death of a Unicorn feels like it’s treading water, dragging out the approach of the adult unicorns, sending Ridley (an art-history major) on a mission to research unicorn tapestries, and repeating the same beats of Elliot choosing his employers over his daughter again and again. Scharfman is clearly titillated by the idea of unicorn gore, both inflicted on the magical creatures and inflicted by them on the deserving human characters. The sight of Grant ghoulishly slicing into a unicorn steak still swimming in purple blood isn’t one I’ll soon forget, but so much of the rest of the film relies on variations of the same punchline, and it doesn’t feel especially edgy by the third or fourth time. The whole midsection of Death of a Unicorn involves killing time until the slaughter starts, and the actual unicorn-menace sequence amounts to a sub-tier Jurassic Park knockoff.

Death of a Unicorn was executive-produced by Ari Aster, who’s ramped up his production game and has been involved in a slew of off-kilter projects, from Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario to Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Save the Green Planet! remake, Bugonia. It’s easy to imagine why the pitch for Death of a Unicorn was appealing, with its gestures toward relevance and fantasy brutality, like a Ready or Not with fairy-tale creatures instead of infernal bargains. But watching the film, all those elements still feel like just that — the stuff of a pitch, ideas written on a whiteboard instead of a coherent vision to be executed. And the joke of a Lisa Frank standard being capable of tearing someone’s guts out isn’t really enough to hang a whole movie on. Apparently even unicorns are ready and eager to eat the rich, but it’s a spectacle Death of a Unicorn just isn’t able to do justice to.