Death of a Unicorn (United States, 2025)

With a title like Death of a Unicorn, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Alex Scharfman’s film has a distinct Yorgos Lanthimos vibe (keeping in mind that Lanthimos made something called The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Although Scharfman doesn’t embrace the absurd qualities to the degree that Lanthimos often does, there’s still a fair bit of that going on this film, which takes a fairly standard horror plot and tweaks it by adding elements of mythology, parody, and deliciously over-the-top gore. Hey, there’s a lot you can do with a horn when looking for inventive ways to kill.

Death of a Unicorn is essentially a one-joke movie but that’s okay because the joke is pretty good and the movie never relies too heavily on the hit-and-miss comedy. This is basically a monster movie in which the monster happens to normally be associated with sparkles and rainbows. There’s some high-level social commentary about raping the environment but that’s part of the satirical thread woven into the narrative fabric.

The story transpires in a remote mountainside locale – the perfect setting for this horror variant. That’s where we find the mansion of dying multi-millionaire Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), who lives there with his unctuous wife, Belinda (Tea Leoni), and odious son, Shepard (Will Poulter). Also on the premises are the butler, Griff (Anthony Carrigan), and the Leopolds’ personal servant, Shaw (Jessica Hynes). The Leopolds’ environmental preserve is the destination of Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his adult daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega). Elliot, a lawyer, is arriving with the hope of getting a new, lucrative position in the Leopold empire and will seemingly say or do anything to achieve that goal, much to the chagrin of his reluctant passenger. That’s when the car accident happens.

It's not that one expects a unicorn to walk out into the street, even if it is the middle of nowhere, but Elliot isn’t paying attention and – wham – the front end of his rental car is wrecked and the horned horse lies dying in a pool of its own purple-blue blood. After recovering from disbelief, Paul inexplicably puts the corpse into the car and arrives belatedly at his destination. Initially, he doesn’t plan to tell his hosts anything but when the unicorn proves to be less dead than Elliot believed it to be, he has to fess up. It comes to pass that the unicorn’s horn and blood have remarkable restorative powers and Odell sees a chance to enhance his already substantial fortune (and possibly cure his own terminal condition). Elliot agrees to go along with an increasingly unhinged scheme, hoping for a share of the financial windfall. Belinda is thrilled, Ridley is appalled, and Shepard needs to take a dip in the hot tub.

There are a few solid laughs but the movie sometimes overreaches in trying to be funny. The horror elements are handled with aptitude, following a werewolf-style template in which the creature hunts down and eliminates the humans one-by-one. For such a limited number of participants, the body count is surprisingly high. Scharfman has fun staging the deaths, where even the more straightforward ones come equipped with plenty of blood and gore. Intestines are on display!

Scharfman has assembled a cast led by Paul Rudd, who one normally doesn’t associate with horror, and Jenna Ortega, who is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Scream Queen. Ortega is very good but Rudd’s performance is uneven – he’s better with the more dramatic material that the humorous stuff. Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter steal their share of scenes with Grant playing the kind of role he has become typecast in.

The unicorn design is convincing, evolving as it does throughout the film from a more “realistic” variation of the mythological image to something darker and more disturbing. One scene echoes a classic image from Alien 3 (the only thing classic from that movie) as the unicorn, with fangs bared, comes face-to-face with Ortega’s Ridley. The movie also doesn’t feel the need to “hide” the unicorn in order to have a big reveal.

Surprisingly for a movie that focuses on the absurd and macabre, one of the things that works best about Death of a Unicorn is the conventional father/daughter relationship. It starts out fraught with Elliot acting like an ass but, as things evolve, not only do we learn more about the underpinnings of the schism but we see the ice start to melt. Some of this is due to Ortega’s performance but Rudd plays the later scenes effectively. Overall, Death of Unicorn falls short of being the Next Great Cult Classic but there’s enough here to enjoy for those who appreciate offbeat horror that doesn’t skimp on the grotesque aspects of the genre. This one’s definitely not for pre-teen girls.

Death of a Unicorn (United States, 2025)