We must reassess our relationship to “messaging movies.” Some of the best modern movies are “messaging movies,” which has created a cottage industry of movies being made with ideas for messaging but without any ideas for a movie. Death of a Unicorn is yet another one — a screed against the rich writ large, because there is a big market for movies on the subject but that’s the full breadth of the text, there is no further prime text and the movie is apathetic about its own genre trappings, comedy horror for convenience as a vehicle for delivering a message.
When such concepts are developed, we may want to begin with what makes this a compelling comedy horror movie? How are the layers of storytelling built into the genre motifs and the layers of understood movie language being used? Because otherwise, we end up with Death of a Unicorn, a destination without a journey, a conclusion without a story.
There is a plot: Elliot (Paul Rudd) and daughter Ridley (Jenny Ortgega) are heading for a wilderness retreat at the grand estate of biopharma magnate Odell (Richard E. Grant), when their car strikes a unicorn on the way. They get out and are subsumed with its magical foresight and healing properties. They take it to the retreat and when the rich biopharma folks get their hands on it, they find the essence of the unicorn can cure any disease — even Odell’s cancer. So they do what rich people do. They cultivate the resource as a means to help the rich and further expand their wealth. But, there are other Unicorns in the woods, who are not happy to have their lost baby exploited for financial gain.
Because the film does not decide which side it will land on, whether it’s comedy or horror or an even split, it ends up choosing to be neither. Instead, it is a plot with a message that has moments of comedy and horror in it.
Alex Scharfman directs the film like a producer. That’s still more of what he is in his directorial debut, because Scharfman does understand the high concept of the movie but not how to exhume empathy, drama, and comedy from it. Like the rich people in the movie, he sees the material and symbolic value of the Unicorn but does not know how to find the humanity in his symbology or clunky metaphors.
The movie then plays awkwardly. Paul Rudd is unnaturally stiff, Jenny Ortega is doing well enough, but seems to be operating within a more correctly realized version of the movie that nobody else is in. Richard E. Grant is having fun and is fun to watch and his rich family and team of workers make for an ensemble wherein the pieces are all there: Téa Leoni plays the rich wife and has an excellent line reading about the girth of unicorn horns; Will Poulter is actually pretty funny as the playboy fuckabout son who takes a lot of outdoor baths and gets addicted to snorting residue from unicorn horns; Anthony Carrigan is amusing as a worker for the household who does not live within their rarified air of privilege.
There are what America’s despotic ruling class would call “concepts of a plan,” the backbone of a movie without any meat or functional skeletal structure for the story. There are ideas, there’s a message, there are characters, but it feels as though we are watching a partially considered pitch, and not the fully realized product of an idea that was worked through from inception to conclusion.
When Death of a Unicorn is funny, and it can be, we wonder why it’s not always funny. When Death of a Unicorn becomes a creature horror movie, we wonder why it doesn’t bake any tension or build into that. It has good aspects of a movie, just a series of things that happen, but nothing to pull it all together into a finished piece that says more than we would know from its trailer — which to be fair, says everything on its mind. And it only has this to say, so why go watch the full movie?
There’s not a clear answer. Death of a Unicorn is a message waiting for a carrier. We can go and watch it and be mildly entertained but we will leave with nothing at all. The movie is an idea, sure, but it’s not an idea for a movie. It’s an idea for a concept of a plan. Eat the rich. Yeah, then what? If it gets anything right, perhaps it’s that while we have good ideas about why we should do things like eating the rich, the actual practice of retaliation and justice against the rich is beginning to feel like a fairytale. We say something extreme like “let’s eat them,” because we won’t, and then, we don’t have to do anything actionable or measurable.