If you find yourself wondering at any point during Alex Scharfman’s Grand-Guignol fantasy satire Death of a Unicorn, “Wait, how come there are unicorns in the Canadian Rockies which nobody has seen before?” then this is not the film for you. However, if some part of you is thinking, “I hope those vile ultra-wealthy despoilers of all that good and pure get what’s coming to them,” then you are in luck. One thing this fitfully fun but often pandering splatter of a film keeps its focus tightly pinned on is the importance of comeuppance for the baddies.
Scharfman begins Death of a Unicorn ambiguously. A father and daughter are driving deep into the Canadian Rockies, inches apart physically but emotionally in separate hemispheres. Elliot (Paul Rudd) is a squirmy and spineless consigliere for the Leopolds, a rapacious billionaire clan whose aging patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) is looking to hand off operations of his pharmaceutical empire to an aspiring sycophant. Ridley (Jenna Ortega) is the prototypical annoyed teenager, a semi-goth college student being dragged to a weekend with her dad’s creepy employers.
Both are grieving the death of her mother, a wound Elliot wants to heal with enforced together time and the pretense that worming into the Leopolds’ graces to earn buckets of money is for Ridley’s good. Before the father-daughter bickering can conclude, Elliot gets distracted and runs over a baby unicorn.
What follows in Death of a Unicorn part variation on the “what do we do with this dead body?” dark comedy trope, given a fantastical jolt by making the corpse a mythical creature, and part lampoon of a ruling class repackaging its rapaciousness as simply the acknowledgment of well-deserved riches. Elliot’s attempt to hide the corpse in his rental car goes awry, as the unicorn’s magical healing properties become apparent.
It is then that the Leopolds start seeing dollar signs. The eerie howls echoing around their mercenary-guarded mountain stronghold are worrisome. However, they are easily brushed aside once Odell starts thinking that grinding the horn into dust could create a rejuvenating elixir.
Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn is at its cleverest when it lets the Odells take over the narrative. Tea Leoni’s slightly wine-sozzled matriarch works overtime enabling her husband’s societally destructive but financially rewarding impulses and their spectacularly over-confident son, Shepard (Will Poulter). The three of them create a lacerating portrait of the banality of greed. They might think themselves “masters of the universe”, fluent in the airy language of Davos and the airport lounge elite, but they just want to grab everything for themselves.
Grant, Leoni, and Poulter find the humor by deftly underplaying their frequently overwritten parts. The trio’s collective wince when learning Ridley’s college major is art history is a gag that speaks volumes, while Leoni’s deliciously dry readings give even too on-the-nose lines like “I haven’t had this much fun since we launched fen-phen” a humorous kick.
By contrast, Elliot and Ridley’s slow-resolving father-daughter rapprochement—kicked into high gear once she claims to have had a vision after touching the dying unicorn’s horn—carries relatively little weight. The depths of Elliot’s ugliness make it hard for a grafted-on breakthrough between him and Ridley to truly resonate. He seems to be a genuinely lousy father, and even tries to kill the baby unicorn after wounding it with the car, an ugly moment it’s hard to imagine Ridley unseeing.
Also, too much of Scharfman’s story in Death of a Unicorn is preordained. The revenge wreaked on the Odell compound by the furious adult unicorns serves as an over-obvious delineation of which characters deserve punishment and which do not. As the horned beasts bloodily tear through the oligarchs’ servants and staff before working up to the higher-level villains, there is less a sense of justice having been served than the familiar feeling of a horror film that found a new wrinkle for otherwise rote carnage.
In recent years, we have all seen the depredations unleashed on society by amoral corporations and individuals. Given that, using mythical monsters to make a point about said amorality distances the viewer from the issue rather than bringing it into sharper focus.