Death of a Unicorn sounds like the kind of film only A24 could pull off — or at least attempt. It’s got Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, unicorn blood with healing powers, and a class satire buried somewhere under all the screaming. It’s part dark fantasy, part creature feature, part family drama, and part B-movie about rich people doing stupid things. In theory, I was completely on board.
But by the halfway point, I found myself rooting for the unicorns.
This is a movie that wants to be absurd in all the right ways — like Sorry to Bother You meets Jurassic Park — but it can’t get out of its own way. Every character is a miserable, self-absorbed chatterbox. Every line of dialogue feels like a punchline to a joke nobody told. The premise had me, but the people lost me.
Magical Roadkill and Moral Rot
The film opens with lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) driving through the Canadian Rockies with his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) for a weekend getaway with his billionaire boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) and his equally awful family. On the way, they hit something — a unicorn. Elliot freaks out, bludgeons it to death in a panic, and hides the body in his trunk.
It’s a wild, ridiculous opening. And for a moment, it feels like Death of a Unicorn knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be: a campy, morally absurd fairytale about greed and guilt. When the unicorn’s blood starts giving everyone miraculous health benefits, things start getting weird in a good way. Rudd’s allergies disappear, Ortega’s acne vanishes, and the rich people smell profit. Then they start sawing off the horn.
This should be the setup for a brutal little fable — something about how humanity poisons the magical for personal gain. But instead, it plays out like a series of shrill, overlapping arguments in a house full of people you’d block in real life.
Whining in the Woods
The problem isn’t the premise. It’s everyone inside it.
Elliot is written as a wimpy hypocrite — a man who kills a unicorn out of fear and then acts offended when someone else wants to exploit it. Rudd tries his best, but the character’s constant moral flip-flopping gets old fast. Ridley, meanwhile, is the only one with any real sense, but she’s also the audience surrogate stuck in a script that keeps making her scold everyone for twenty minutes at a time.
The Leopold family, meant to be grotesque caricatures of wealth, are just loud. Richard E. Grant hams it up as the dying patriarch who sees profit in everything, but even he can’t keep the tone straight. Téa Leoni plays his icy wife like she’s in an HBO satire, and Will Poulter’s spoiled son feels imported from a different movie altogether — one that’s much dumber.
By the time the film turns into a full-on unicorn revenge story, I was begging the creatures to finish the job. There’s no emotional anchor here. Just a parade of irritating people waiting for CGI hooves to rearrange their internal organs.
Blood, Horns, and Missed Opportunities
To its credit, Death of a Unicorn has a few glimmers of what could’ve been. Scharfman’s direction is occasionally striking, especially when it leans into painterly imagery — shots of misty woods and glowing horns that feel lifted from a storybook. And Dan Romer’s score (with Giosuè Greco) gives the film a melancholy pulse it doesn’t really earn.
But the satire is hollow. The movie keeps hinting at something bigger — about consumption, about class, about the commodification of beauty and purity — and then it just drops it in favor of a gore gag or another round of shouting. The tonal swings are dizzying. One minute we’re watching a unicorn tear someone in half like a horror movie villain, the next we’re supposed to feel bad about humanity’s moral decay. It’s hard to tell what Scharfman actually wants us to take seriously.
Even the effects can’t decide what tone to land on. The unicorns themselves are a mix of practical and digital that never fully gels — they look too real for a comedy, too fake for a fantasy, and too sanitized for horror.
The Ending: Too Little, Too Late
The finale does at least deliver on the promise of its title. When the adult unicorns return for revenge, the movie suddenly remembers it can be fun again. The last fifteen minutes are chaotic and gory and finally lean into the camp it should’ve embraced from the start. There’s a decent emotional beat with Ortega’s character at the very end, but by then it’s too late. The damage — both emotional and tonal — has already been done.
Final Thoughts
I wanted to love Death of a Unicorn. I was ready to embrace its weirdness, its blood-soaked fairytale energy, its darkly comedic absurdity. But the movie keeps tripping over its own cleverness and burying any emotional core under a pile of smug, whiny characters.
There’s a good B-movie in here somewhere — a wild midnight flick about rich people stealing unicorn blood and paying for it. But this one’s too self-serious to be fun and too shallow to be smart.
In the end, Death of a Unicorn isn’t terrible. It’s just exhausting.
And the unicorns deserved better.