‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: A Surprisingly Lifeless Elevated Horror Comedy

Horror is the only genre where dumb characters can be an asset rather than an issue. If a movie asks viewers to delight in the spectacle of its protagonists’ bloody deaths, it helps to have no sympathy for them whatsoever. And it’s very hard to root for a character who keeps making stupid decisions that bring them closer and closer to said their demise.

Dumb characters in satire are a little trickier. You need smart writing of and around those dumb characters to really make them work, and that’s something Death of a Unicorn never quite achieves. Its cast of characters is so consistently loathsome, and often so shockingly dim-witted, that it’s hard not to root for their demises at the hands (well, the horns anyway) of the title animals.

Unicorns, it turns out, are not cute and cuddly like the rainbow-maned stuffed animals we give to our children. They are the wild, ferocious beasts of ancient legends — and when someone runs over their baby and drives off with its lifeless body, they will not stop until they get it back, like Michael Myers with a jagged glowing horn instead of a kitchen knife.

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This fictional universe’s unicorns may be monsters in the literal sense, but most of its human characters are far more monstrous. The one notable exception is Ridley (Jenna Ortega), a mopey teenager reluctantly tagging along with her father Elliot (Paul Rudd) on an important trip to meet with his bosses, the Leopold family. Patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) suffers from an incurable form of cancer and wants to ensure continuity in his family business. For reasons the movie never really clarifies, Odell has selected the bumbling, nervous Elliot to oversee the corporate board that will ensure the lavish lifestyles of his glamorous wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and dopey son (Will Poulter) after he passes away. The Leopolds claim to value family above all else, which is why Elliot drags Ridley up to their estate on a massive nature preserve in Northern Canada for the signing of the final paperwork.

Things go awry almost immediately when a distracted Elliot plows into the aforementioned baby unicorn on the drive from the airport. Try as he might to hide the evidence of the incident, the Leopolds soon discover what he’s done — and when they realize that the unicorn’s blood may contain supernatural healing properties, they waste no time poking and shaving and carving up the poor beast up for personal exploitation and profit.

Ridley, who shares a mysterious connection to the creature, Googles something like “are unicorns dangerous” and then tries to warn her father that they should skedaddle before the consequences of their actions show up. Elliot is so hesitant to do anything that could jeopardize his job, and so desperate for a taste of his boss’ money, that he ignores all the many warning signs that Ridley is correct until it is too late to do anything about it.

Obviously there is no hope of Ridley convincing the greedy, amoral Leopolds. And that’s part of the problem; everything about Death of a Unicorn is obvious. The narrative proceeds almost exactly how we expect it to play out from its opening scene to its last. Not a single beat in the script by first-time director Alex Sharfman is surprising. And the characters’ behavior (and their halfwitted decisions) are as predictable as the storyline.

If Death of a Unicorn just wanted to be a non-stop gorefest, maybe the extreme obviousness of the premise and the lack of suspense in its execution wouldn’t matter. But the film only ramps up the action in its final third, and even then it keeps a fair amount of the unicorn-on-man violence off-camera. The first hour of the film is all feeble critique of dead-end capitalism and its cruelest and most successful adherents. The Leopolds make ripe targets, but the satire’s bite is about as sharp as a baby unicorn’s teeth.

The cast does what it can with the material, but there’s only so much nuance an actor can add to a screenplay driven by such simplistic characters. Will Poulter fares the best of the group simply by playing his spoiled failson as such an oblivious and obsequious fool. It’s also nice to see Rudd take a break from fast-talking charmers, and I admired how willing he was to make Elliot look like a weak, sniveling toady.

But Grant and Leoni get very few opportunities to show just how funny they could be in a movie about the worst people in the world fighting a pack of crazed unicorns, and Ortega is already in danger of getting typecast as the 21st century’s ultimate sullen teenager. Now 22, she needs to do something that shows her range before she ages out of the only sort of role Hollywood seems to think she is capable of playing.

There are worse ways to spend 100 minutes in a movie theater right now than Death of a Unicorn. There are also plenty of better ones. The slasher-style kills are effective, and a couple of the tossed-off quips are good for some chuckles. (I liked when Leoni informed her guests that her butler was “making my famous moussaka” for dinner.) But a lot of the film lives up to its title. It’s just lifeless.

Additional Thoughts:

- Jenna Ortega’s character is named Ridley, and given Death of a Unicorn’s story structure and genre, that feels like a nod to the Alien franchise. And maybe it is; but Elliot also calls her “Rid,” and she spends the film wandering through the woods around the Leopold estate in a red hoodie she drapes over her shoulders. It’s just too bad the rest of the film wasn’t quite as clever as the suggestion of its “Rid Riding Hood.”

RATING: 5/10