NATHAN WEINBENDER:
What’s most surprising about Death of a Unicorn is that it ultimately has no surprises in it. Once you hear the premise, you’ll be able to map out what happens, sight unseen, and you won’t be far off. It’s part one-percenter satire and part monster-on-the-rampage movie, and it’s toothless as the former and unimaginative as the latter. That’s before it makes an unwelcome detour into weepy, maudlin family drama.
The movie has an impressive ensemble cast, starting with Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a chirpy single father and his sullen teenage daughter. He’s brought her along on his latest business trip because they’ve grown apart following his wife’s death. On a winding mountain road, they hit a creature with their car. It kind of looks like a horse, but its blood is purple and it has a horn in the center of its head that glows. How majestic—until dad puts the thing out of its misery with a tire iron.
He’s a lawyer for a family of pharma billionaires trying to settle their affairs while the patriarch (Richard E. Grant) is on his deathbed, his wife (Téa Leoni) and meathead son (Will Poulter) perched like vultures nearby. We’re obviously meant to think of the Sacklers: They’re boorish, venal capitalists who have tricked themselves into thinking they’re philanthropists because they’ve slapped their name on a wildlife preserve and send indiscriminate relief funds off to wherever.
Through a series of complications, they discover that this dead unicorn, which is still in the backseat of the rental car, has magical healing properties. Ka-ching! Meanwhile, we see that more horned creatures are barreling through the forest on a revenge mission, eventually trapping the characters—and us—inside this gorgeous mountain estate and goring, trampling, impaling and ripping them all apart. Of course, the monsters wait to attack at night and manage to take out the house’s power, so if the prospect of elaborate and gory death scenes is a selling point, you can barely see anything that’s happening.
Death of a Unicorn is being sold on its genre-bending premise and recognizable stars, but the plot is predictable and the cast is wasted. Rudd plays his corporate attorney like a dewy-eyed simpleton, as if he just wandered in from the set of I Love You, Man; he’s terribly unconvincing. Ortega’s character is meant to be brainy and resourceful, but nothing comes of it: She determines the unicorns’ next moves by studying tapestries from the Middle Ages, but the audience is already ahead of her. Anthony Carrigan, so brilliant on the HBO series Barry, is totally wasted as the family’s dutiful and ultimately disposable right-hand man. Poulter is really the only actor who walks away from the film unscathed and even gets in a few genuine laughs: After someone is impaled, he earnestly wonders, “Isn’t that how he would have wanted to go?”
If the horror and fantastical elements of Death of a Unicorn are depressingly rote, the satire is woefully stale. We’ve already seen variations on this idea in Knives Out and The Menu and Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and Succession, and this one feels at least a decade past its sell-by date. It’s just one tired, try-hard joke after another about how buffoonish and selfish and clueless the rich people are. Talk about beating a dead horse.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.