Elliott (Paul Rudd) really needs a win.
Still struggling to get his life together after his wife has died of cancer, he’s bringing his teenage standoffish daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) on a work retreat at the wildlife preserve sponsored by his billionaire Big Pharma bosses – who are also playing host – in the northern woods when a mysterious creature leaps out onto the road and the pair accidentally kill it with their car.
After the initial shock, they discover that this wasn’t just any unlucky deer, but a real, honest-to-goodness unicorn. Panicked and determined to make a good impression on his employers, Elliott packs the carcass in the back of their rental SUV and continues on his way. However, when the unfathomably rich and eccentric Leopold family discover his secret, and the unicorn turns out to be less dead than he’d thought, shit goes off the rails in first time feature director Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn.
A concept ripe for exploitation, Scharfman has been handed a bit of a golden ticket with Death of a Unicorn. Featuring a stellar cast including the above-mentioned father-daughter duo along with Richard E. Grant as ailing patriarch Odell Leopold, Tea Leone as his doting but shrewd wife Belinda, an always dependable Will Poulter as their serial entrepreneur/booze & drug-soaked son, Shepard, alongside family servants Griff (Anthony Corrigan) and Shaw (Jessica Hynes), the film has every possible advantage right out of the gate. Which makes it all the more disappointing when it never quite takes off.
Once the Leopold’s discover that they can take financial advantage of the unicorn situation, their focus moves from old business to new business, which whips the career focused Elliott into a subservient frenzy. Meanwhile, Ridley is attempting to understand the bigger picture around this creature and the possible ramifications of its death. When her theories indicate that it’s maybe better to back off rather than lean in to the tragedy, the Leopolds brush her off as a kook, burying their heads in the potential piles of cash they see coming from their new revenue stream.
This should be an absolute banger. Big action, silly violent fantasy, a cast packed with A-plus comedy killers; it should be a no brainer. Unfortunately, what comes through most in Death of a Unicorn is the emptiness of an underutilized cast and distractingly shoddy visual FX.
In a film where every core cast member has a history of truly memorable performances and characters, very few step up to the plate here, and it it not their fault. The script puts heavy dampers on Rudd and Ortega, both rock solid performers who are given almost nothing to do, despite being nominally the leads in the film.
Richard E. Grant – Withnail, himself – also feels like someone it tugging on his reins the entire time, with a character that is an uninspired retread of his role in Saltburn. The only actor really allowed to take big swings is Poulter as the playboy son, Shep. He’s a comedy bazooka, delivering one big laugh after another; while the rest of the cast is playing comedy checkers, he’s playing chess.
But the subdued performances here are no fault of the actors, really, it all feels very calculated to try and add an air of reality to a decidedly unreal situation. It might have been fine if the proverbial juice was worth the squeeze, but sadly a ton of great, goofy, extremely gory violence is hampered by confusingly dodgy CG that looks like it came straight out of Shrek 2. Which is not a slight to that classic, those designs work in an all-digital world, but when your cartoon monsters don’t match their realistic surroundings, it’s going to be a disappointing distraction.
There are moments of glee in Death of a Unicorn; almost every line Poulter delivers lands hard, and some of the violence wreaked in the wake of the unicorn’s abduction is genuinely fun and exciting, but there are too many faults that even these peaks can’t even out the film’s valleys. Though the film isn’t bad by any stretch, it is also pretty far from being great, landing it in the one place that film critics dread: it’s fine.
In a film where a with this much going for it, it’s a shame that it only occasionally lives up to the potential. Thought it is not quite bad enough to warn viewers off, it is a film that one might want to moderate expectations for, and that’s perhaps even worse.
Review originally published during SXSW in March 2025. The film is now streaming on HBO Max.