DEATH OF A UNICORN - Mark Reviews Movies

Death of a Unicorn, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

Death of a Unicorn might have made for a good old-fashioned monster movie. It's clear writer/director Alex Scharfman wants to make that movie, too, when his debut feature sees a pair of wild unicorns hunting, terrorizing, and gruesomely killing a group of humans who have taken and begun conducting experiments on the carcass of their foal. If that were the full extent of this story, the filmmaker could have been on to something.

Instead, Scharfman wants this tale to more than that, so we're also stuck with some on-the-nose and half-hearted satire about the obliviousness of the rich and the way the pharmaceutical industry so regularly puts profits over people. Despite a game cast, that element of the movie isn't especially funny, because it really does come across as a bare-minimum form of satire, but at least making almost every character here a joke does make it easier to accept how many terrible decisions they make when the monsters do attack.

Ultimately, the two distinct modes on display here do no favors for each other. The early critique of the wealthy and the business of medicine makes us wait and hope for some more significant point to be made, so the story's sudden shift into a by-the-books creature feature leaves us wanting. When the unicorns do start some carnage, though, it's fairly effective, making us wonder why Scharfman even bothers with the comedy angle when his heart seems to be in this string of monster attacks.

The basic premise is funny enough, after all, without the added layer of social criticism. It begins when Elliot (Paul Rudd), a corporate attorney, and his college-aged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) drive through a vast expanse of forest perverse, purchased and maintained by a pharmaceutical tycoon. Elliot's hoping to become the main legal counsel for Odell (Richard E. Grant), his family, his businesses, and all of his non-profit endeavors, because it would mean two things: the high point of his career and a promise of financial stability for himself and his daughter. That's important, after Elliot's wife, Ridley's mother, died of cancer a few years prior.

Anyway, Elliot hits something in the road while distracted, and after stopping and realizing that the poor animal isn't dead yet, he gets an even bigger shock. The beast looks like a young white horse, but it has a horn growing out of its head. Ridley is drawn to the mystical animal, and just as she seems about to receive some grand vision of some cosmic truth, her dad begins bashing the unicorn's head with a tire iron—"sympathetically" bashing, he later says.

To make a lot of broad character details and talking around what happened on the road shorter, Odell, his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and their son Shepard (Will Poulter) figure out that there's a unicorn in Elliot's SUV. Elliot and Ridley also deduce that the unicorn's blood must have healing properties, since her acne clears up and his eyesight is corrected after coming into contact with the oily purple stuff. Since Odell is dying of cancer, he decides to call in some scientists and rush a potential cure for his illness.

The satirical angle of this family and their scheme is wholly one-note. They're all selfish, entitled, and focused on making as much money as possible, and we're reminded of that over and over again, with Shepard's incompetent entrepreneurial ambitions, Belinda's way of pretending to be diplomatic in order to get exactly what she wants, and the sudden remission of Odell's cancer leading him to switch from thoughtful and compassionate to greedy and tyrannical in an instant. The arrival of those unicorns, howling and screeching in the night while searching for their young one, is almost a relief once it becomes apparent that Scharfman has only a couple of jokes to play.

The gag at its core is better, anyway. The notion of a unicorn, a fantastical and majestic creature in its status as legend, being a ruthless killing machine is deviously amusing. When the parental unicorns arrive at Odell's fortress of a mansion, the movie may become a string of suspense and action sequences, as the humans hide and run from the beasts while the monsters impale and stomp and bite and kick their targets, but Scharfman is a bit more imaginative with those scenes than with the other side of the story. Plus, there's something doubly satisfying about watching Odell and his ilk be stalked by creatures, since the clan is irritating both within the story and as a matter of how thinly they're written as a source of satire.

The whole affair, though, is disappointing, because Death of a Unicorn is unsuccessful in its larger ambitions, which turn out to be unnecessary once Scharfman decides to fully go with the angle of rampaging monsters on the loose. Yes, that's almost too obvious a turn, given what comes beforehand, but it's something the filmmaker can handle and actually seems interested in doing well.

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