It’s increasingly difficult to get people under 40—or, for that matter, anybody—out to movie theaters, but in the past few years, one genre has held consistent allure: Fantasy and fantasy-horror, movies fixated on wild scenarios and manufactured, convoluted mythologies, have become a big draw not just for young adults but also for those well into adulthood. It seems there’s no cutoff point at which it’s time to leave behind childish things. Make a movie about a grief-stricken dad and his daughter hitting a unicorn while driving on a twisty remote road, and both the young and the perpetually young at heart will show up in droves—maybe.
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Death of a Unicorn, the feature debut of writer-director Alex Scharfman, released by A24, is one of those movies designed to draw its audience into a crazy swirl. The eminently likable Paul Rudd plays recently widowed dad Elliott, a mild-mannered compliance lawyer, who can’t seem to close the rift that’s opened between him and his disgruntled college-age daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), since her mother’s death. He’s invited her along on a business trip, to the wilderness retreat of eccentric zillionaire Odell (Richard E. Grant), the head of a hugely lucrative pharmaceuticals company. Odell is dying, and he’s looking to add Elliott to the organization’s board, a stroke of luck that would give Elliott and his daughter lasting financial security. On their way to Odell’s old Europe-style estate, they hit an at first unidentifiable creature with their rental car; when they step out to inspect this bit of almost-roadkill, they see its glowing single horn and a patch of oozing purple blood on its flank. Ridley, touched by the sight of this special and presumably dying creature, reaches out to gently touch its horn, an act that, in addition to clearing up her acne, sends her to a higher plane of consciousness: this is indicated by a whole Grateful Dead caravan’s worth of pastel tie-dye colors whirling around her. Her trance is rudely broken when Elliott beans the suffering animal with a tire iron, putting it out of its misery—maybe. What has Elliott done? He’s about to find out.
The creature, whose carcass Elliott and Ridley somehow bundle into the car’s backseat, doesn’t want to stay dead. It also turns out that the beast’s horn can do more than make acne disappear; this magical uni-spile has healing properties that not only restore Odell to health, but fan the capitalist flames inside him. Unicorn horn could be the answer to any number of worldwide human problems; it could also double or even triple his fortune. Odell’s performatively philanthropical wife (played by the enormously gifted, and long underappreciated, Téa Leoni) and layabout rich-kid son (Will Poulter) latch onto the plan, while Elliott tries, unsuccessfully, to stay on morally neutral ground. Meanwhile, Ridley is horrified by all of it, not just because she’s a pure-hearted maiden (which is what allowed her to commune with this battered unicorn in the first place), but because she’s done some Googling and has learned that a destroyed portion of the famous medieval unicorn tapestries contained a warning for humans about what happens when you incur a unicorn’s wrath.
Got all that? Death of a Unicorn has been conceived as a kooky puzzle movie that defies all logic, in the vein of another A24 film that became a huge hit and won multiple Oscars, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s 2022 Everything Everywhere All at Once. That film’s loopy, entropic plot wasn’t for everyone, but the film did serve as a boundary-breaking showcase for Asian actors (among them Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, both of whom won Academy Awards), and explored, at least in a loose, freewheeling way, philosophies largely ignored in the West. It was also about the importance of family—and you can never go wrong with that.
Death of a Unicorn is also about the importance of family, perhaps in an even more vague way: Elliott and Ridley have got to find a way to reconnect, and by the end of the film—throughout which which ruthless, greedy humans meet grisly but deserved fates at the pointy end of a unicorn horn—they do. The film is also a sendup of terrible, moneygrubbing, rich people: thus, it’s also a satire about something important. Yet being “about” one thing or another doesn’t necessarily make a film more worthy, and in this case, the message is just a flimsy excuse for ugly humans to pursue fantastic, mystical creatures in brutal ways, with the promise that they’ll get theirs in the end. The movie’s vision of what real-life unicorns might be like is mildly interesting: we may generally think of unicorns as pretty, gentle creatures suitable for adorning toddlers’ birthday cards, but Scharfman has imagined them—at least when they’re angry—as fearsome, rampaging beasts, with reddish eyes and pointy incisors, like equine dinosaurs. You want them to win against the humans, but you might not really enjoy looking at them.
Mostly, though, Death of a Unicorn just feels like exhausting, enforced fun: its plot goes everywhere all at once for no discernible reason. All the actors are appealing and engaged with the task at hand, but they’re at the mercy of an unfocused plot. A24 has earned a reputation for specializing in these types of films, movies that take place in outlandish alternative realities or at least somehow or other mess with their audience’s heads: Everything Everywhere All at Once, I Saw the TV Glow, Green Room, Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, the Robert Eggers’ triple threat of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu. No matter what you think of those movies, Death of a Unicorn might be the least effective, and the most unwittingly boring, of all of them.
But that’s what you get from a studio that, time and again, opens space for the vision of filmmakers. A24 has also given us Moonlight, Lady Bird, Aftersun, Minari, Eighth Grade, The Zone of Interest, and more, pictures that really do open up new ways of thinking about familiar things: the sandpaper friction that can exist between mothers and daughters, the everyday thoughts and actions of truly evil people, the way common terms like “the immigrant experience” barely capture the subtle realities of what it means to adapt to a wholly new environment. In other words, all of those movies are “about” something, yet they’re so much more than just being about what they’re about. There’s nothing wrong with outlandish flights of fancy on the movie screen. But there’s also a point at which fantastical, intentionally overcomplicated plots can become so workaday that they cease to work as an escape from reality. When a living, breathing unicorn comes to seem like business as usual, you long for the miracle, ordinary in its magnificence, of an everyday horse.