A film with a few solid laughs and crowd-pleasing moments, Death of a Unicorn never quite pushes the envelope as far as it could or should. Landing somewhere between a traditional horror comedy and a Succession-lite satire, Alex Scharfman’s debut feature is a reimagining of the unicorn maiden mythology that finds father-daughter duo Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) in the middle of a peculiar situation. En route to visit Elliot’s mogul boss on a remote nature preserve, they unexpectedly run over a unicorn. Ridley experiences a hypnotic trip gazing into the eyes of the mythical creature, causing Elliot to beat it to a purple bloody pulp and stow it in the trunk.
Elliot is a fixer hoping to elevate himself to full power of attorney over the eccentric pharma billionaire Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). The patriarch of a wealthy family that embodies so many cliches, Odell lives with wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and son Sheppard (Will Poulter), an aspiring thought-leader and disrupter without an original idea in his head. Ortega’s Ridley is naturally the smartest one in the room, the pure maiden (an angle that could have been further exploited for some bigger laughs) who combs through research from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archives, discovering that things are about to get bloody.
Steve Park and Sunita Mani play doctors on call at the mansion who stand by to synthesize the unicorn’s horns into an injectable serum that mysteriously cures Odell, who was suffering from cancer. The film gets about as scientific as Jurassic Park as the family debates what to do next. Naturally, Sheppard calls his bros and tries selling an eight-ball of horn powder to the highest bidder.
While there are glimmers of the promise of satire and Poulter delivers comic gold, the script by Scharfman gives him too little to work with––it never quite commits to a track. Unicorn instead reverts to the least-interesting path of a straight horror comedy, with the kind of unicorn horn-impaling that you might expect. Comedies such as this are delicate balancing acts; despite the value add of Rudd playing a guy who is willing to become unlikable to set himself and his daughter up for a future, the affair is mostly predictably straightforward. Ortega again plays to type as a notch above the IQ of the rest of the ensemble, giving away what’s to come as she tries to give due warning.
While, individually, the actors give it their all, Death of a Unicorn never quite finds its collective footing or place, a watered-down compromise of a picture more than a confident piece of storytelling. This feels almost like a throwback to the old days at Miramax, where Harvey Weinstein test-screened every film to death with the goal of manufacturing a hit. Sometimes you get smart feedback; usually, when you try to predict what everyone might like, you end up with a film that’s lost the script. Death of a Unicorn isn’t quite that, but it does feel like a thematic and genre compromise that doesn’t do as much with its high concept as it could.
Death of a Unicorn premiered at SXSW 2025 and opens in theaters on March 28.