The title of Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn suggests it should be a fantasy film. Instead, it’s that rare, odd hybrid, a heartwarming slasher. Like a unicorn itself, that’s an incongruous mix—though not, in this instance as graceful as unicorns are supposed to be.
The dead unicorn in question meets its fate on a curving wilderness road. The driver, Elliot (Paul Rudd) is a pharmaceutical lawyer who’s been asked (for ill-explained reasons) to bring his semi-estranged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) to meet his dying boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant).The dead unicorn makes him late, but the boss is more than willing to forgive when they figure out that the dead unicorn (a baby) can heal virtually any disease or injury with its blood. Odell and his greedy family plans to profit… but it turns out the unicorn has parents, and they aren’t pleased.
The slasher set up here is pretty straightforward and proceeds more or less as you’d expect; all the greedy assholes get what’s coming to them, one by one. Grant is suitably repulsive as Odell, as is Will Poulter as his shallow junkie son Shepard and Téa Leoni as the smarmy wife Belinda.
The problem is that the CGI unicorns look like—CGI unicorns. They have sharp teeth and they salivate and so forth, but it’s hard not to keep thinking, “That’s a ridiculous looking CGI unicorn.” They’re just not especially scary, or even evocative.
Worse, perhaps, is the fact that the film signals early on that unicorns have a soft spot for maidens like Jenna who are pure of heart (I guess that saying the word “virgin” was considered distasteful). So you know going in that the only character you care about isn’t in much danger. That saps much of the suspense, and it also means that Jenna doesn’t really have to find within herself reservoirs of resourcefulness or ruthlessness. She’s the final girl not because she’s tough or smart, but simply because she’s the final girl. It’s not much of a character arc.
The heartwarming parts here show more promise, even if they’re by the numbers. Jenna’s mother died some years before the film opens, and Elliot, partly out of grief, became a career-obsessed doofus whose sold his soul in pursuit of money. He really does care about Jenna though—there’s a lovely scene right at the beginning where she falls asleep on his shoulder on the airplane, and he smiles in surprise and delight.
Rudd’s a talented and charming actor. Ortega is too, and they do what they can to breathe life into the clichéd relationship and its healing. The script doesn’t give them much to work with, in part because there’s not time to explore their relationship in the midst of all the unicorn murdering. The father-daughter drama gets trampled underfoot in the rush to finish up the lackluster slasher.
And there’s also a moral here; pharmacy executives are ruthless assholes and exploiting nature for the benefit of the wealthy is grotesque. While that’s a worthy enough message, the film again early on assures us that unicorns are essentially immortal and indestructible, which lowers the stakes precipitously and makes the exercise feel predictable and glib.
There are a range of decent movies struggling to get out here—one of which might give more screentime to the wonderfully understated Anthony Carrigan as the Leopold’s servant Griff. But despite a lot of acting talent and occasional flashes of adequacy, Death of a Unicorn is too much of a mish-mash to recommend. In theory a horse with a horn might be awe inspiring and beautiful; in practice, in this case, though, it just looks silly.