A creature feature satire with a point.
Death Of A Unicorn begins, as many good creature features should, with something unexpected in the middle of the forest road. Only this time, it’s not a raccoon or an unfortunate hitchhiker – it’s a unicorn. A pristine, pastel-hued, literally glowing unicorn. And it is extremely dead – or so it seems.
From this opening splatter of sparkle and viscera, Death of a Unicorn builds a surprisingly delicate tower of mischief – equal parts corporate satire, eco-fable, and blood-slicked bedtime story for the disenchanted. It’s the kind of film that knows exactly how ridiculous it sounds and then commits to that ridiculousness with such knowing sincerity that it manages to pull it off.
Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play Elliot and Ridley Kintner, an estranged father-daughter duo whose already-awkward trip takes a swift detour into the morally murky when they mow down a mythical creature en route to their weekend destination: the opulent lodge of Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant), an ailing pharmaceutical mogul who has exhausted his treatment options and is begrudgingly confronting his mortality.
Nobody’s reinventing the wheel here, but they’re all spinning it with such practiced skill that you’re hard pressed not to just sit back, grin, and watch the cast do what they do best. Rudd is typical Rudd – affable, slightly panicked and vaguely overwhelmed while Ortega actually gets the chance to play the lighter side of her now-familiar rhythm of dry quips and Gen-Z exasperation. Richard E. Grant, on the other hand, is clearly having a lovely time doing precisely what he does best: delivering unctuous monologues and twinkling with the menace and slippery charm of a man who wouldn’t hesitate to monetise the magical whatever the cost. Téa Leoni, as his picture-perfect wife, is pitch perfect as the lackadaisically entitled but disengaged corporate first lady, flitting from one virtue signalling charity event to the other, pausing only to launch another exploitative wellness brand or patronising the household staff while Will Poulter absolutely nails their hapless son Shepard, a louche gilded nepo baby whose unmatched arrogance and entitlement is inversely proportional to his actual acumen.
Death Of A Unicorn canters onto the screen with an energy that’s part bedtime story, part boardroom farce. It’s not afraid to go sharp, but it always remembers to keep things fun. The satire’s there – a pointed look at the way nature is only sacred until there’s profit to be made – but it never drags the film down into message-movie territory. But what really makes Death of a Unicorn sparkle is its refusal to treat the unicorn as anything other than what it truly is: a majestic, unknowable, faintly terrifying forest god with hooves. The creature is treated not as a joke, but a judgement – the sort of being you’d absolutely hang a poster of on your wall as a child, only to realise years later that it was staring directly into your soul the whole time.
Writer-director Scharfman’s feature directorial debut is sharp and confident, never letting the concept overstay its welcome and building to a conclusion that’s violent, cosmic, and weirdly sincere – a reckoning dressed in sparkles, hooves, and hellfire where the unicorns aren’t just vengeful beasts, they’re celestial auditors, and the Leopolds’ hubris is overdue for balancing. By the time the surviving unicorns have assembled for that beautifully bonkers finale, the film has quietly built something more lasting than just a gory joke. There’s a weird tenderness to it all – a sense that even amid the chaos, something ancient and important has been awoken, for both good and ill.
Death of a Unicorn might not rewrite the creature feature rulebook, but it doodles all over the margins with glitter pen. It’s strange, silly, and just sincere enough to work – a fairytale with bite, and a horn aimed squarely at late-stage capitalism. Not bad for a film that begins with roadkill.
