Death of a Unicorn

What can you expect from a title this straightforward?

Well, everything it has to offer begins on a plane. On this Air Canada flight are the Kintners, Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), as they wait to get off to get going. Their destination is the Leopold Estate, whose ailing patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant), looks to make Elliot his new proxy. Elliot, recently widowed, looks to use Ridley for sympathy points. But, first, Elliot needs to look at the road or else ...

(Bump)

Too late.

Elliot runs over an actual unicorn foal on the way there. The Kintners and their hosts soon realize that the unicorn's purple blood, as well as its horn, can cure anything. So, a freshly invigorated Odell gets his best scientists to work to synthesize the magical ingredients. While the adults see dollar signs, Ridley, who earlier bonded with the dying unicorn, sees it as a bad idea. The unicorn, as it turns out, isn't truly dead, but its larger and angrier parents have ways to permanently kill off everyone on the premises. It's up to Ridley to soothe the unusually savage beasts.

Alex Scharfman, a producer of several short films, makes his feature directorial debut here. It's essentially a slasher film whose killers are the most docile mythological creatures imaginable. It's a great hook, but it takes almost halfway there to get to that point. Its biggest tension during the first act comes from waiting for the inciting incident to happen. Once it does, and boy howdy, watching the unicorn agonize for so long is unbelievably uncomfortable. It's still weirdly funny when it briefly resurrects and thrashes around in Elliot's rental car. The unicorn killers help invigorate the film, but some of their kills are a bit needlessly cruel. Well, maybe not that of Odell's son Shepard (Will Poulter), who gets kicked in the head, but a few comparatively nicer others get worse deaths.

At least the cast gives it there all. The Leopolds maybe unlikeable, but they are weirdly entertaining. It's fun to watch Odell and Shepard ham it up once they partake in unicorn dust. Shepard, in particular, becomes a functional addict, whose swings between insanity and sanity are astounding. Matriarch Belinda (Tea Leoni) is extremely vapid, but she gets some good lines, while her own death is perhaps the cruelest of them all. It does remind you that they're jerks by refusing to allow Ridley to hand over the foal to its parents. Dr. Song (Steve Park), one of their scientists, is overly sesquipedalian, but he's not as callous as his employers. The best character here is Griff (Anthony Carrigan), the family butler and the most sensible man on the entire estate.

Oh wait, I kind of forgot about the Kintners. Ridley, by far, is the most compelling character as she struggles with her mother's recent death and her dad's workaholism. A major subplot has her, an art major, research The Unicorn Tapestries, whose events parallel those of the killing spree. She's understandably frustrated when her findings fall on deaf ears, at least until near the end (and by the wrong person). It doesn't take long to sympathize with her, unlike her oblivious dad, who only redeems himself at the end. It's quite nice to see them reconcile, which gives the audience hope after its ambiguous ending plays out.

The CGI for the unicorns is sometimes too obvious, particularly when we see them in daylight, but it still doesn't detract from the agonizing aftermath of the inciting incident. On the plus side, there's some impressive CGI for the cosmic phenomena the film shows us and the Kintners. There's some pretty good tension once it switches to horror, which is perfectly accentuated by Dan Romer & Giosuè Greco's score. Odell's death, in particular, was easily telegraphed, but it was no less surprising. Those uninterested in deaths by unicorn may find themselves wowed by the Leopolds' impressive estate, or the location filming in the Hungarian wilderness (standing in for Canada). You can thank production designer Amy Williams, and cinematographer Larry Fong, for these artistic creations.

So, what else can I say about Death of a Unicorn? It’s worth seeing at least once just to see its oft-kilter premise in action. It gets a while to get going, but it once it gets going, it goes rather well. It's not an instant horror classic, but it's still a decent matinee. If anything, it's an interesting incentive to learn about The Unicorn Tapestries, even if their history is partially fictionalized here. You'll be impressed with what you'll learn from that research; I was.

But that's it for now.