Death of a Unicorn opens in theaters Friday, March 28. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
There’s an intriguing premise with the potential for entertaining moral conundrums at the center of Death of a Unicorn. First, corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) hits a mysterious creature. Then, when it turns out the animal’s corpse has healing powers, Elliot and his conscientious teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) must figure out how to hide the accident from Elliot’s wealthy pharmaceutical boss. Unfortunately, this synopsis is about as far, as deep, and as detailed as it gets for the latest horror comedy from indie powerhouse A24. Despite featuring a number of fun performances – especially that of Will Poulter as the pharma CEO’s wily failson – Alex Scharfman’s feature debut quickly plateaus.
Death of a Unicorn’s emotional throughlines all seem to end where they begin. In the opening scenes, Elliot and Ridley land in the Canadian mountains by plane; as the college teen falls asleep on her father’s shoulder, only for him to shimmy out of the way to grab fallen legal documents, causing her to hit her head on the armrest. It’s a wonderful, hilarious encapsulation of their estranged dynamic. Ridley’s mother has passed away; in response, Elliot threw himself into his work, irrevocably changing his relationship with Ridley. Now, with his ailing boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) looking for a proxy before he dies, Elliot has the chance to set Ridley up for life, but on the condition that he prove himself a family man as well.
En route to the executive’s isolated mansion, the father-daughter duo, distracted by their bickering, mows down a white horse with a single horn – a creature the characters collectively, and reluctantly, decide to refer to as a unicorn. This leads to strange, fantastical happenings – including hypnotic visions and magical healing – but not before some delightful, human-on-apparent-unicorn violence intended to put the injured creature out of its misery. Its bright purple blood splatters everywhere, but the imperfectly realized CGI beast (forgivable, considering the ruckus it causes) isn’t quite dead, which further complicates Elliot’s already knotty interview with Odell.
This setup has all the makings of a story that evolves in delightful ways, but Death of a Unicorn never progresses past the (initially amusing) philosophical debates kicked off by the Leopolds’ discovery of their guests’ fairytale roadkill. It’s a conversation-heavy film until its creature-feature final act, but none of that jabbering changes the minds of anyone on screen – least of all Ridley, the film’s ostensible conscience. Ortega delivers a wonderfully lived-in performance as a baggily-dressed youth withdrawn from the world, defined entirely by her activist leaning. She’s an actor capable of injecting great thought and subtext into any scenario, but Death of a Unicorn is too flimsy even for her talents, rendering Ridley something of a blank slate who ends up so unwavering as to be grating. (It’s a bad sign when the voice of reason and compassion in an attempted cinematic takedown of ruthless billionaires makes you consider siding with the billionaires.) Then again, what else is there to do than consider alternatives that the film and its characters do not, since all its drama, comedy, and thrills swiftly flatline.
Bearing the brunt of Ortega’s ire, the typically entertaining Rudd delivers an exceptionally plain, checked-out performance. And that’s a shame, considering the color the rest of the cast manages to bring to the screen: Grant is delightfully animated, as is Téa Leoni as Odell’s opportunistic wife. Jessica Hynes and Anthony Carrigan, meanwhile, add lively dimensions as the family’s stone-faced enforcer and fed-up butler. But it’s Poulter who comes closest to rescuing the film from its malaise. Nearly every line he delivers is hilarious, owing to how deftly and energetically he balances his character’s slimy scheming with the insecurities of someone who’s never made it on his own. He’s also the only actor whose performance seems to evolve or transform in any way, even if this is courtesy the drug-like properties of a magical substance.
There’s some amount of imagination at play, and A24 is hardly in the wrong for throwing its weight behind a first-time filmmaker. The unicorn’s designs are imaginative, as are its magical abilities – even if their discovery is rendered useless by characters making erratic choices, and losing their key motivations when convenient. Its horror elements tend to be inconsistent, especially in tone. While some sequences are meant to pay homage to Jurassic Park, the outcome tends to align with that film’s lesser reboot, Jurassic World: Cartoonish villains and complex, relatable characters alike suffer vicious deaths designed for our enjoyment and applause. As a result, some of the intended revelry feels icky.
Scharfman clearly has a knack for staging and blocking physical comedy, even if the way he actually captures it is lacking here. The eye is seldom drawn to what’s funniest, but rather, to what happens to be in the center of the frame. There’s also the ingenious conceit of the creature’s presence messing with electricity, which allows the film to seamlessly switch into haunted house mode when necessary. However, the tension and humor of these sequences don’t adequately rise and fall, and the editing is squeamish about what little cartoonish gore it features. This renders Death of a Unicorn a passive and ultimately tiring experience, one that gestures frequently towards fun and interesting ideas, but rarely follows through on them.
