Review: Death of a Unicorn

It opens with a bang—or more accurately, a crunch. A unicorn, lit in celestial glow and laced with mystery, meets the front bumper of Paul Rudd’s Prius, and just like that, Death of a Unicorn announces its twisted fairy tale with a splash of purple blood. From here, Alex Scharfman’s debut feature promises magic, mayhem, and a bite-sized skewering of big pharma and the upper crust. But like so many satirical creatures of late, this unicorn struggles to find its footing, stumbling through genre beats and mythic ambition with a horn full of ideas and hooves made of clay.

Jenna Ortega plays Ridley Kinter, an art school cynic carted off into the Canadian wilderness by her father Elliot (Rudd), a bumbling lawyer for the powerful, pill-pushing Leopold family. The destination: a retreat-slash-contract-signing with Elliot’s boss, the terminally ill Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant, phoning in colonial condescension), wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and trust-fund failson Shepard (Will Poulter). Things take a turn when Elliot slaughters a baby unicorn to death with a tire iron after the car accident, triggering a descent into bloodlust, biotech exploitation, and mythological vengeance. Not that any of it feels particularly urgent.

There’s something charming about the audacity here—an A24 creature feature that takes the ancient purity of unicorn lore and steeps it in satire, grief, and gore. It’s The Menu with hooves, Jurassic Park with horns, and yet it never quite feels like its own beast. Scharfman wants to say something about late capitalism, ecological desecration, and generational trauma, but his script hovers in the shallows, content with winks and tropes instead of teeth and depth. The result is a unicorn that’s more novelty than nightmare.

Tonally, Death of a Unicorn is a cocktail with too many mixers: slasher, satire, magical realism, dysfunctional family drama. Each flavor emerges only to be drowned out by the next. Ridley’s grief-fueled bond with the unicorn gestures at something raw and poignant—the lingering surrealism of loss and longing—but the film doesn’t trust itself to linger there. Instead, we ricochet into boardroom villainy, horn-based homicides, and family squabbling that never transcends caricature.

The cast, to its credit, does its damndest. Rudd leans hard into oblivious dad mode, but his charm thins out under Elliot’s selfish streak. It turns out affable asshole is not a good mode for Rudd. Ortega is misused as the lone moral compass, her anti-capitalist jabs frontloaded and then largely forgotten. Only Will Poulter, decked out in rich-kid loafers and oozing entitlement, seems to understand the assignment. He’s a pitch-perfect human cartoon, snorting unicorn blood and failing upward with real comic timing. Anthony Carrigan, as the world-weary butler Griff, provides a much-needed dose of deadpan—an oasis of restraint in a film that often screams when it should whisper.

But then there are the unicorns. Majestic, vengeful, kind of rubbery. Their design flirts with the uncanny, and not always in the good way. When the adult beasts finally rampage, the film flirts with creature-feature glee—a mythic middle finger to the ultra-rich—but the build-up is so protracted, and the violence so emotionally weightless, that catharsis never lands. It doesn’t help that the CGI buckles under pressure, especially when juxtaposed with the film’s otherwise naturalistic aesthetic.

Scharfman clearly has an eye and a vision. The film’s final moments, where grief, magic, and mythology briefly entwine, hint at the more affecting story this could’ve been. But these glimmers arrive too late to elevate the whole. Death of a Unicorn sets out to be something wild, weird, and wicked. Instead, it feels like another rich-people-get-what’s-coming movie wearing a unicorn mask—a paper-thin disguise over an all-too-familiar face.

2/5