‘Death of A Unicorn’ Is Another Fun Notch in the Horror-Comedy Belt

‘Death of A Unicorn,’ a star-packed comedy/fantasy/horror hybrid feature from A24 that premiered at South By Southwest on Saturday evening, leans heavily into what’s good in mid-tier Hollywood movies right now. As we’ve covered on this site extensively, directors and writers are doing lively genre work in gore-soaked narratives that don’t take themselves particularly seriously. ‘Unicorn’ features buckets of absurd viscera but also delivers a pointed and funny satire of the pharmaceutical industry, strongly checking both the comedy and horror boxes. It’s hard to gauge how successful a film is going to be from a SXSW audience, which will hoot and applaud for just about anything, but Death of a Unicorn has sleeper hit potential.

DEATH OF A UNICORN ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Alex Scharfman
Written by: Alex Scharfman
Starring: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Carrigan
Running time: 104 mins

Paul Rudd and Jenna  Ortega play father and daughter, still mourning the tragic death of their wife/mother. Rudd is a slightly nebbishy attorney for a Pfizer-like Big Pharma firm, and Ortega is the “Jenna Ortega character,” a vaguely goth-y young adult with a good heart. They fly to Canada to meet up with the Sackler-like family of the pharma company that employs Rudd. While driving through some sort of Canadian nature preserve, they hit and maybe kill a baby unicorn. Ortega grabs its horn and has a mystical experience, and then the plot commences.

The story moves through some predictable beats. The pharma company greedily wants to exploit the unicorn’s blood and powdered horn, which have epic healing properties. Meanwhile, an ancient semi-evil awakens in the woods, threatening to kill everyone in sight. Like the movie ‘Krampus,’ which this one largely resembles in tone and structure, it seems like a corny idea. But first-time director Alex Scharfman understands where this movie falls on the genre timeline. He keeps things moving along, and definitely doesn’t take his material too seriously.

Rudd and Ortega, the box-office draws, are perfectly amiable throughout, but the movie really belongs to the supporting cast. Richard E. Grant is deliciously slimy as the pharma patriarch who stands to benefit the most from exploiting unicorn resources. Téa Leoni, doing her best work in a long time, is pitch-perfect as an utterly sold-out non-profit scammer who keeps a database of Davos attendees. But best of all are Will Poulter as the drug-addled heir to the fortune, who delivers one hilarious set piece after another, and Anthony Carrigan, “Noho Hank” from ‘Barry,’ as the family’s beleaguered manservant, a comic butler character for the cinematic books alongside Tim Curry from ‘Clue’ and Sir John Gielgud from ‘Arthur.’ His simple reaction shots to the unfolding lunacy around him had the crowd roaring at the debut.

Once the unicorns show up in earnest about halfway through, the comedy turns very bloody in a way that might put off some audiences and make this movie an absolute non-starter for kids under the age of 12, or at least a very mature 10. Some extremely gross things occur. At the same time, the movie is awash in cool unicorn lore and does a great job explaining the ridiculous reasons why and how everything is going down. The unicorn effects are largely practical, using puppetry to create various “raptor in the kitchen” moments. There’s very little CGI, aside from the brightly-colored visions that Ortega, and later Rudd, have. But these are magical creatures after all, so the movie earns its occasional flashes of color.

Scharfman is no genius auteur. Any scenes that don’t contain urgency and action feel stilted and awkward. The writing, when we’re not dealing with anything directly unicorn-related, is pretty pedestrian. We’ve seen the “dead parent as motivation” trick a thousand times before. But a game cast, and some fun action, put Death of a Unicorn in the same position as movies like M3GAN and Cocaine Bear: A cheesy genre flick with enough slickness to have some mainstream appeal.  The future of humanity may be in doubt, but at least genre movies are delivering big, dumb, genre-bending blood-soaked fun.