In Death of a Unicorn, debut filmmaker Alex Scharfman throws caution, subtlety, and unicorn lore to the wind for a raucous and ridiculous dark comedy-horror hybrid that’s part Jurassic Park, part Knives Out, and all A24 chaos. Anchored by Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a fractured father-daughter duo caught in the horned crosshairs of mythic retribution, this satire skewers wealth, exploitation, and the limits of creature-feature logic with giddy abandon. It’s messy, shallow in parts, and occasionally let down by some unfinished VFX, but it’s also deeply funny, frequently bloody, and undeniably entertaining.
The film kicks off like an absurd bedtime story gone very wrong: Elliot (Rudd), a corporate lawyer looking to score a life-changing promotion, is en route to a secluded estate in the Canadian Rockies with his emo daughter Ridley (Ortega). Their strained relationship simmers in every shared glance until THWACK! They hit a baby unicorn. That singular moment spirals the pair into a nightmarish, capitalistic fever dream. With healing powers in its blood and the Leopolds, an obscenely rich pharma dynasty, salivating at the idea of monetizing the creature’s corpse, all hell breaks loose.
What unfolds is a gory, satirical eat-the-rich fable where unicorns become less about sparkles and purity and more about sharpened hooves and retribution. Scharfman’s script is more interested in laughs and carnage than coherence or world-building. Logic buckles under the weight of spectacle. Ridley’s surreal, other-dimensional encounter with the baby unicorn hints at spiritual subtext the movie never explores. There is also this connection between her mother and these spiritual creatures that is explained away by “This tapestry is at her favorite museum” that felt lazy. These missed opportunities don’t tank the experience, but they do leave a unicorn-shaped hole where depth could’ve gone.
That said, the performances are a riot. Ortega’s Ridley, in her Red Riding Hood-coded hoodie, is our emotional anchor, and while the film doesn’t give her inner arc enough time to truly resonate, Ortega makes the most of it with a mix of sarcasm and sorrow. Rudd, ever the king of dadcore charm, balances comedy and quiet remorse with ease. But the movie belongs to its villains: Richard E. Grant is gloriously grotesque as the dying patriarch, Téa Leoni is delightfully vacant as the clueless matriarch, and Will Poulter delivers a scene-stealing turn as their deranged, muscle-bound son Shepard, a unicorn-horn-snorting himbo with an MBA in nonsense. He’s a future cult icon.
The unicorns themselves are hit or miss. Sometimes they look like majestic murder machines; other times they resemble badly textured game mods. But when the blood starts flying — and it really flies, all is forgiven. Scharfman has a clear reverence for old-school monster flicks, staging his unicorn attacks with dynamic flair, practical gore, and a playfulness that makes the carnage feel more Looney Tunes than Hereditary. The kills are ridiculous, gruesome, and almost always deserved, a cathartic bloodletting of the privileged class that has as much in common with Orca as it does The Last Unicorn.
Yes, the movie flirts with meaningful themes, corporate greed, grief, the ethics of pharma, and the exploitation of nature, but only in passing. Scharfman isn’t here to sermonize. He wants to make you laugh, make you squirm, and maybe give you a unicorn-related nightmare or two. And on that front, Death of a Unicorn delivers. If he can deepen the emotional grounding in future work, Scharfman has a very bright, bloodstained path ahead in the creature-feature genre.
As uneven as it is, Death of a Unicorn is one hell of a time, a satirical, gory, laugh-out-loud fairy tale that just so happens to include a unicorn bludgeoning a billionaire with its horn. And frankly? That’s more than enough magic for now.
3.5/5 Stars
