Death of a Unicorn Is A Trite Satire That Bleeds Its Punchline Dry
Eat the rich, or die trying.
We may be witnessing the last dying gasp of the “eat the rich” genre. Social satire that skewers the ruling class has been around as long as there has been civilization, but the genre has been running rampant in Hollywood for the past decade, enjoying an all-time peak with the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019. But as we’re seeing more movies trying to mine every metaphor out of “eat the rich” satire as they can — from The Menu, to Blink Twice and the upcoming Opus — you start to see the slowly diminishing returns. And that’s a downturn that’s deeply felt in the latest movie in the genre: Death of a Unicorn.
Alex Scharfman’s so-edgy-it-hurts horror-comedy was met with a baffling amount of cheers and laughs during its buzzy premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, which I can only say was a result of the kind of groupthink that Death of a Unicorn was satirizing. But all the oohs at the very heavy-handed digs at the ultra-wealthy, and the gasps at the sudden shocks of gore, I only found perplexing — there’s nothing Death of a Unicorn was saying that hasn’t been said before. And what it did have to say, it repeated until its punchline was bled dry. Admittedly, there is a certain novelty to Death of a Unicorn’s premise but anything fresh about the film is undercut by the film’s dogged insistence that its comedy and satire is on the cutting edge.
Death of a Unicorn begins with Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) traveling to a crisis management summit with Elliot's boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), when they suddenly hit something on the road. That something is a unicorn, straight out of myth. When Ridley touches the unicorn’s horn, she is put into a trance and experiences an incredible cosmic vision — which is swiftly interrupted by Elliot bludgeoning the dying unicorn’s head. Elliot, afraid that he’s hit a protected creature in the wilderness reserve that Odell lives in, decides to stuff the unicorn in his trunk until he can figure out what to do with it, which a stunned Ridley protests, to no avail.
When they arrive at the Leopolds’ estate, they’re greeted by the most stereotypical of ultra-wealthy families: the sickly narcissist Odell, his self-absorbed “philanthropist” wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and his very dumb, very arrogant son Shepard (Will Poulter). But even as nauseatingly stupid as the Leopolds are, it’s not long before they notice that Ridley is acting oddly, and that there’s something trying to break out of the trunk of Elliot’s car. The group retrieves the unicorn and quickly learns that its horn has magical healing properties, which the Leopold family doctor (Steve Park) uses to synthesize a cure for Odell’s cancer. It seems like a fantastic miracle — until the unicorns’ parents start hunting down its killers.
Death of a Unicorn has precisely one punchline, and it’s one that writer-director Scharfman hits again and again until the joke is as dead as that unicorn. It turns out the wealthy are morally bankrupt and willing to butcher an innocent, endangered creature as long as it wields a profit! And that they’re happy to throw anyone underfoot, so long as to protect their lifestyle and the illusion of being “good”! No matter how many jokes the movie makes about how “nonprofits are always trying to get your money,” it doesn’t make the satire any deeper or smarter. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t so boring.
The unicorn gets a monstrous makeover in Death of a Unicorn.
To be fair, Grant, Leoni, and Poulter are deliciously slimy in their roles — Grant gives a slightly sinister edge to his scheming old man, while Leoni is glamorously dense. Poulter, however, is the true MVP of the movie, strutting around in progressively shorter shorts as he declares that the cure for cancer is “the biggest one!” or hurls abuse at the Leopolds’ longtime servant, Griff (a very underrated and underused Anthony Carrigan). Poulter has got a knack for comedy, and his simultaneously arrogant and airheaded portrayal of the worst dude you’d meet at your Business 101 class is genuinely the funniest, most refreshing thing to come out of the movie.
On the opposite end of Poulter’s brilliant comedic turn is Rudd sleepwalking through his part as a widowed father so desperate to provide for his daughter that he becomes a spineless brown-noser. Rudd plays his role way too broad, as if he’s starring in a Documentary Now! sketch, that by the time the film takes a turn for the emotional, every tender moment he shares with Ortega’s Ridley feels unearned. It’s the one performance that feels out-of-step with the particular tone of the movie, even as that tone becomes increasingly absurd. Ortega does her best with the lion’s share of the emotional heavy lifting, but she’s still got to treat it with a light touch, since the film takes a sharp turn from heightened satire into heightened monster-filled bloodbath.
The film’s gore is cartoonishly over-the-top, to the point that it felt less like a new, edgy riff on Jurassic Park than it felt like Quentin Tarantino’s parody of a Jurassic Park movie. At one point, you have to wonder how long someone’s guts can get dragged out of them, before you realize that you care more about this question than the character getting gutted. It’s a peculiar failure of Death of a Unicorn, that by the time the bodies start dropping and the film finally gets around to its retribution against the rich, you’re just not hungry enough to start eating.
