Review: Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

In the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, there's a scene where the titular duo are chatting with their geeky buddy Holden about the movie being adapted from the comic book based on them. They're surprised to hear that Miramax is making the movie given their classy, highbrow reputation, to which Holden responds that the studio has never been the same ever since they produced the hit teen comedy She's All That.

I've been thinking about this scene a lot lately whenever the subject of A24 has come up. Having built their reputation in the late 2010s and early '20s as a modern-day Miramax (except without the sleaze of the Weinstein brothers) that specialized in arthouse dramas and "elevated" horror films that film geeks went gaga for, in the last couple of years they have enjoyed an explosive surge of success in the wake of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-busting sci-fi action-comedy that paired a bonkers story with the kind of broad appeal that helped them win both critical acclaim and mainstream success. Seeing an upstart independent studio from outside the Hollywood system take off as a legitimate mini-major has been exciting for me as a movie buff, but lately, I've started to wonder if success has started to change them, as their core brand seems to have shifted from a decidedly indie one to something that resembles the Hollywood of the '90s and early '00s, before the rise and dominance of modern, interlocking mega-franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They still make offbeat films like Bodies Bodies Bodies and I Saw the TV Glow that feel true to their roots, but increasingly, these come paired with films like the topical action thriller Civil War, the teen horror-comedy Y2K, Ti West's X trilogy, the prestige wrestling biopic The Iron Claw, and the upcoming romantic comedy Materialists that feel like the kinds of movies you'd see coming out of Hollywood twenty or thirty years ago. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. A lot of the young film geeks who propelled A24 to where it is now are themselves quite nostalgic for that era of Hollywood, a time when movies were big but they still remembered that they were movies that had to tell complete stories in three acts, not advertisements for the next installment in a franchise. A24's brand these days, increasingly, feels like "the studio that makes the movies that they just don't make like they used to." And in a time when the 2010s mega-franchise model of Hollywood has come in for increasing backlash, A24's pivot to a '90s throwback as they went from indie to a major player can feel refreshing in its own way.

Which brings me to Death of a Unicorn, a film that I feel encapsulates a lot of what A24 now seems to represent. On one hand, the premise, a horror-comedy monster movie in which the monster is a unicorn, is the kind of goofy thing you'd expect A24 to make. On the other hand, beneath the goofy premise this is a remarkably straightforward monster movie that's a world away from "elevated horror," one that's kind of thinly written and uneven but is propelled by a great cast, a good sense of humor, and plentiful violence and gore. It's the kind of horror "programmer" that the genre is built on, a crowd-pleasing bloodbath that doesn't take itself too seriously and seeks to have fun with its premise above all else, and on that front, it did the job and had me leaving the theater with a smile on my face.

Our protagonists Elliot and Ridley Kintner are a widower and his teenage daughter who are traveling to the sprawling estate of Elliot's boss Odell Leopold in rural Alberta for a corporate retreat. Along the way, while driving through the vast nature preserve surrounding the estate, Elliot accidentally runs over a strange animal that is immediately recognizable as a unicorn foal. Not knowing what else to do, they stuff the body in the back of their car and continue on their way, only for it, not quite dead, to alert everybody at the Leopold estate to its existence. What's more, Elliot and Ridley were both exposed to the unicorn's blood and saw their various minor ailments (Elliot's poor eyesight, Ridley's acne) go away as a result, leading Odell, the frail and elderly CEO of a pharmaceutical company, to order experiments on the unicorn in order to study its seemingly miraculous healing properties in the hopes of not only curing his own cancer but also getting rich selling the cure to others. Unfortunately, this unicorn being just a foal means that its parents are out there, as Ridley quickly realizes when she does some research on unicorn legends, and they are now coming for the Leopolds and everybody else at their estate in the hopes of getting their kid back.

The leads in this are what you'd expect. Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd as Ridley and Elliot are mostly just playing themselves, Ortega the moody, snarky teenage girl who'd make great casting for a live-action Daria movie and Rudd the mix of the self-aware funny man and the dashing leading man. There wasn't really much done with the backstory involving the death of Ridley's mother, a plot point that only becomes important because an old photo of her at a museum in front of the Unicorn Tapestries winds up giving Ridley important clues as to what's really going on with the unicorns, which itself felt like an infodump that existed just to get the audience up to speed on the film's fantasy lore. There was a plot thread here about Elliot being an overworked Movie Dad whose relationship with his daughter has grown frayed thanks to his commitment to his job and who has to patch things up with her in order to get through this, but while it is part of the film's broader "eat the rich" message, it's not really something the film lingers much on. That said, while their characters are underwritten and fairly two-dimensional, Rudd and Ortega sell them. Again, they could both play these characters in their sleep, and they made for a pair of charming leads who I wanted to see succeed.

The real stars of the show, however, were the Leopolds, the film's main human villains. Richard E. Grant plays the family patriarch Odell Leopold as a pseudointellectual slimeball who, even when dying of cancer, can't be bothered to show any empathy for others and only cares about himself, and whose attitude and actions grow increasingly egomaniacal once his unicorn horn treatment heals him and makes him feel invincible. Téa Leoni as Belinda doesn't get the same amount of character development, but she still makes her feel like the kind of rich, obnoxious housewife who every service worker is intimately familiar with, the kind who's just as greedy and selfish as her husband and, while she does indeed love her family, has no love to spare for anybody else. The MVP in the cast was Will Poulter as the Leopolds' douchebag son Shepard, the kind of guy you know is gonna get a gruesome and well-deserved death the moment you see him show up in swim trunks. He decides to test the, uh, narcotic properties of the unicorn's body parts in the name of science (i.e. he snorts rails of ground-up unicorn horn), and as everything goes to hell around him, he grows ever more deranged and delusional. Together, the Leopolds conspire to get filthy fucking rich off the unicorn, reserving the miracle treatments derived from it for the super-rich once they realize that it only exists in finite quantities, all while treating their staff and employees (played by a who's who of talented, scene-stealing comic and character actors like Anthony Carrigan as their long-suffering butler, Sunita Mani and Stephen Park as scientists studying the unicorn, and Jessica Hynes as the head of their security) like dirt and hiding behind them as cannon fodder during the unicorns' rampage. They were a well-cast and well-written family that you just love to hate and cannot wait to see get fucked up by the unicorns.

And the movie delivers on that front. It's never particularly scary, with writer/director Alex Scharfman interested more in the comedy and the silliness than the horror, but that's not to say he doesn't bring the pain when the unicorns come out to play. The kills are all bloody messes, featuring impalements, dismemberments, a head getting stomped on, and one poor sucker getting disemboweled. The unicorns are kept in the dark for most of the film, less to build tension and more because the CGI-heavy effects work for them when we see them in full honestly wasn't the greatest, but it did do the job in establishing them as fearsome presences who should not be trifled with, a world apart from the majestic, fantastical creatures we normally think of when we hear the word "unicorn". Scharfman clearly loves retro monster movies like Alien and Jurassic Park, and while the influence can at times go a bit beyond the level of "homage" into just straight-up copying various beats from those films, I won't deny that it worked.

The Bottom Line

This was a movie that deserved a bit more love than it got. It's not a great movie, but it's one I can see being rediscovered down the line as a hidden gem of a little monster movie that's fairly shallow but still fun and funny, a film that set out to do one thing and did it well. Check it out when it hits VOD and streaming.