About six miles north of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is a satellite campus known as The Cloisters, a set of medieval stone buildings set at the top of a hill in Fort Tyron Park and filled with exceptional art dating to the 11th century. One of the gems of the collection is the Unicorn Tapestries, Flemish works from the late 1400s that depict a sort of dark fairy tale, nobles hunting a fictional unicorn and the series of events that follow.
I made the trek from Brooklyn to The Cloisters before moving back to Chicago a decade ago, and I can still remember standing in the grand stone room where the massive tapestries hang, awed by their intricate detail and the juxtaposition of depth and whimsy they possess. As these tapestries confirm, unicorns have been a mythical fascination for centuries; and as Death of a Unicorn confirms, writer/director Alex Scharfman likely stood in that same room and took from them the inspiration for his eat-the-rich creature feature.
Starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as Elliot and Ridley, a father and daughter heading off to a weekend with his billionaire pharmaceutical company boss and his family, Death of a Unicorn almost immediately delves into the absurd. The pair are in transit down a winding country road to the Leopold compound—inhabited by dying patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their hapless son Shepard (Will Poulter)—when they run head-on into some large creature that nearly sends them careening off the road. Upon further reflection, they've hit a unicorn, complete with shimmering purple blood and a glowing golden horn that sends Ridley into some kind of other universe when she touches it.
Naturally, they decide to put it in the trunk of their rental car and continue on their way to the mansion.
Upon arriving, Elliot and Ridley are welcomed by the Leopolds and their staff, including catch-all bag man and butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan) and head of security Shaw (Jessica Hynes). There's plenty of plot introduced quickly in the film's first 20 minutes or so, namely that Elliot is raising Ridley, appropriately angsty and progressive for a college-aged teen in 2025, alone after the death of his wife/her mother. We also learn that he's banking on being named the Leopolds' legal proxy, effectively coming into control of their fortune. The family is a trio of walking clichés, from Odell's British accent and greedy nature to Belinda's preference for brushing everything inconvenient under the proverbial rug to Shepard's trust-fund-baby sense of entitlement.
When the Leopolds discover what Elliot and Ridley brought with them, it quickly becomes not just a source of fascination but a potential gold mine, given what they learn about the creature's healing powers. That is, until mama and papa Unicorn come out of the woods surrounding the mansion looking for their dearly departed calf. What follows is to a certain degree a gory and gratifying take down of the 1%, but it's all unfortunately muddled by comedy that falls flat, a mish-mash of tones that never quite figure out how to play nice with each other and an ending that feels like Scharfman forgot what movie he was writing.
Individually, any of the themes attempted here might have worked fine; it's the cobbling them all together that seems to get the film in trouble. Elliot and Ridley are navigating life without their matriarch, which is probably sad and something we should care about, but Ridley's too busy being our apparent voice of reason in the chaos to give us much time with her grief. Helpfully, she investigates the Unicorn Tapestries enough to tell all of us watching about them and throughout the film she's staunchly against the Leopolds' scheme to profit off the unicorn. How convenient.
Fans of well-realized CGI monsters and gory demises will at least find something to enjoy in the film's middle act, as we see Mom and Dad Unicorn and their brethren, as well as their gruesome kills, more closely. These pissed off parents are not at all the unicorns of Lisa Frank or anyone's fairy tale dreams; they're growling like dinosaurs, hoofing it like horses and killing like beasts (I'll admit, I had to watch a few of the worst ones through my fingers in front of my eyes). But all the best romps through watching an ensemble cast get picked off are usually backed up by something of substance in the storyline. Death of a Unicorn is instead so predictable it becomes tiresome, and the film's final scenes feel amiss because the preceding hour-plus didn't really earn any of it.
Death of a Unicorn absolutely gets points for concept; there's a lot to cull here both in the mythology of the creature and the political commentary of haves and have nots. There's also a great horror film in here somewhere, turning the usually frilly and fanciful concept of unicorns on its head. It's Scharfman's valiant but ultimately unsuccessful effort to marry the two (injected with a bit of comedy that never quite works) that in the end makes the film more forgettable than fun.
Death of a Unicorn is now in theaters.
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