Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn seemingly only exists to terrify little children mortally as they walk with their parents to whatever theater in the multiplex is showing Dog Man – an arresting sight to the seven-year-old eye, one that will open up a bevy of complex and ugly questions on the ride home about mortality and that Goldfish Farm Upstate that little Flipper made his way to last year. If a unicorn can die, so can a fish, and so can… I? Perhaps this is a too-rosy view of modern childhood and its innocence, but it certainly feels like those hypothetical children are the few who would pay attention to such a project. “A,” “two,” and “four” are just part of the Count’s segments on Sesame Street, not the tri-character signifier for a boutique studio in desperate need to throw something into production during the WGA and SAG strikes, for which they received an exemption to make this, knowing it would be the sole title folks might remember from those Deadline headlines when it inevitably shuffled towards release a few years later. A simple, easy-to-remember premise, packed with camera-ready talent: It may not have been a recipe for an overwhelming smash hit, but surely it could have been better than what will ultimately hit screens this weekend.
Admittedly, it is a pretty silly idea to make a riff on Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist as translated and localized for modern American audiences by C-tier Amblin talent, though the connection will only really remain available to nerds who spend their free time making tier lists of what they’d pull out of the Criterion Closet should they defy the odds and get an invitation to Physical Media Valhalla by choking on a Red Vine during hour ten of Les Vampires. That movie was a heady social drama about a hit-and-run and its aftermath, where a bicycle-riding man is killed by a couple engaged in an illicit affair, who then decided to cover it up, with the guilt tearing them apart before fate gets its own revenge. Substitute the couple for an estranged father (Paul Rudd) and daughter (Jenna Ortega) duo on their way to an isolated mountain retreat owned by a dying hypercapitalist (Richard E. Grant), and the cyclist for a unicorn foal that mistakes itself for a deer when it’s caught in their headlights. Once they slam to a halt, they can’t believe that they’ve actually slain (well, maimed, before Rudd brings down a tire-iron on the poor thing to end its suffering) a mythical creature, and Ortega fully comprehends the gravity of what they’ve gone, having touched the foal’s horn and glimpsed The Great Beyond in the last brief flickers of its life.
What the hell do you do after that? Should you just drive away? Will the rental company’s insurance call this an act of God? None of these questions have satisfactory answers, so Rudd loads up the foal in the back of their rental SUV and continues along the way. When they arrive at said hypercapitalist’s estate, they quickly become acquainted with the other members of his family, who will soon become Rudd’s patrons – he’s the would-be executor of Grant’s estate, responsible for doling out dollars to the man’s NGO-oriented and scheming wife (Tea Leoni) and their crypto-moron son (Will Poulter, playing Billy Magnussen). The foal, however, is a lot like Steven Seagal: hard to kill, and he causes enough of a ruckus that everyone in the home, from the lowliest servant to the highest-caliber security officer, is made aware of its existence. Once it’s truly, finally dead, Ortega reveals to the group that the unicorn’s blood is a cure-all: both she and Rudd have experienced magical forms of healing (Ortega’s acne disappeared, and Rudd’s vision suddenly became 20/20, causing him to ditch his geeky glasses quickly).
Grant quickly realizes that this is his second chance and immediately assigns his pharma company’s science team to synthesize a cure for his disease. He also orders them to exploit the corpse as much as humanly possible to maximize the profit they can obtain. Rudd’s blinded by a promise he made to his recently-deceased wife – take care of his daughter, ensure she’s ok – and only sees the path to financial solvency (as well as potentially an end to the illness that tragically killed his wife), while Ortega, haunted by the visions and “connection” she made with the foal sees the situation for what it is: Deeply fucked-up. All’s well and good for those gathered at the estate – they’re about to make a killing selling ground-up unicorn horn to the top one percent of the one percent – until Ortega realizes that this is simply echoing the old legends of the unicorn, in which one’s death would bring back the rest of the herd, angry and ready to kill anything that’s in their path. So, a pair of unicorn stallions enters the picture, full of righteous fury, and start slowly tearing their way through the complex, shrugging off small-arms fire as they try to work their magic to bring the foal back to life.
Scharfman and company spend the second half making a version of Jurassic Park that Seth Green and the Robot Chicken people would have found too on-the-nose and dull for a one-minute stop-motion bit. I audibly groaned when the Aussie head of security shouted “Shoot her!” when being dragged away by a ready-to-murder and raptor-like unicorn, and the addition of some extra viscera in the gore doesn’t act as a substitute for the missing suspense or entertainment. The creature design is too dull to add anything either, with the rule of dark-fantasy ugliness surpassing the bizarre possibilities that a unicorn – practically synonymous with Lisa Frank garishness in color – might have afforded a more creative production (I genuinely think this is what separates something like Violent Night from its imitators – at least Santa’s powers in that remained goofy as fuck, even when he’s turned into a tough guy). Instead, it’s just grimly lit riffs from already strip-mined sources while the ensemble flails around in search of something that might be funny to someone in the crowd.
Yet, Death of a Unicorn feels designed to maximize the ick factor, given how cruel it is to the corpse of the animal in question. We see so much happen to this foal throughout the film – he’s hit by a car, beaten to death with a tire iron, shot in the head, slowly drained of blood, chopped up for steak, and more that I’m probably forgetting – that any amount of payback dealt out by his parents can’t equalize the scales of cinematic justice. Some hasty dialogue tossed out by Grant, meant to link his acts of barbarity to the fictional creature with the big-game poachers that exploit very real endangered species for similar thrills and “precious” goods, is about as close as Scharfman gets to drawing an appropriate real-world parallel. Yet, the comparison falls flat when the unicorn blood is efficacious – if ground-up rhino horn were to cure all forms of cancer, it might be worth arguing whether it’d be ethical to hunt them, but it doesn’t. It’s an erectile dysfunction folk-cure with a hideous origin.
Keep in mind that the movie doesn’t really have an answer to that question and only comes out against the capitalist family once it becomes clear they’re going to hold these benefits back from the general population (that’s also when the foal’s parents show up), so you get to watch this poor little critter go through all of that for the sake of an attention-grabbing premise and a half-baked metaphor. The entire cast seems to realize that it’s quite challenging to do Whedon-like comedy routines buffeted by scenes of Grant chewing his way through unicorn steak and Poulter using its blood as a cocktail mixer, so the humor often lands flat, with the actors retreating into the comfortable confines of their archetypes so that they can cash those checks at the end of the day.
Such is the conundrum that Death of a Unicorn finds itself in: It’s too goofy to make the semi-serious points about animal cruelty that it wants to, too serious and icky to be funny, and too mild at its core to be righteous when it matters.