What happened to the big-budget high concept pictures of yesteryear? What happened to films like Jaws and The Running Man and Back to the Future and those motherfucking Snakes on a Plane? Films that aren't necessarily eloquent in their execution, but are still fun romps and thrill rides that manage to engage in social commentary while embracing satire, allusion and action — explosions and violence and the like.
Death of a Unicorn is one such film, and although it doesn't quite stick the landing (or even really take off), it's a relatively fun, blood-soaked ride that tries for profundity but ends up in a shrug.
The film follows lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley Kintner (Jenna Ortega), a father-daughter duo with a strained relationship, driving up to the palatial mountain estate of the Leopolds, a big-pharma phamily and Elliot's employers. The astronomically rich brood is made up of Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), his unscrupulous son Shepard (Will Poulter), and his enabling wife Belinda (Téa Leoni). With Odell on his death bed, the visit centres on the family signing over power of attorney privileges to Elliot.
Although the mountains they drive through appear untouched, something's clearly sleepin' in them hills. As they journey round, Elliot and Ridley bicker, before Elliot hits something that looks suspiciously like a unicorn and holy shit, it is a unicorn! As it lays in the road dying, Ridley touches its horn, and the two engage in a mystical union wherein she sees the universe through an LSD-like revelation, riding on the celestial current with the unicorn until Elliot puts it gruesomely out of its misery.
They bring the unicorn to the Leopold house, where the group realizes that the blood and horn have magical healing properties, which revives the dying Odell. Immediately, the Leopolds begin cooking up ways to make billions off this discovery. Although they have Elliot's full support, Ridley tries to convince them that it's all a very bad idea. The Leopolds calls in a pair of doctors (Sunita Mani and Steve Park) to synthesize these medicinal properties, but when the unicorn's pissed off parents show up looking for their fallen offspring, the real brutality begins.
Death of a Unicorn is a satire that starts off concerned with the notion of capitalism vs. compromise, but quickly morphs into a story of capitalism vs. compassion. We already know which one wins out in real life, but we've got unicorns, so anything is possible. The film presents the unicorn as the answer to all of life's ills, an easy yet unreal solution for big problems, one that can be exploited and pulverized into very expensive — and life-saving — medicine
Writer-director Alex Scharfman's direction is adequate but unremarkable, and the design of the unicorns somewhat makes up for the mediocrity: more bestial than other depictions, they're feral, dark and menacing, playing into their untamable characterization.
With these monstrous creatures in tow, the film settles comfortably somewhere between E.T. and Jurassic Park, leaning hard into man's inability to understand or live in harmony with the unknown. Our repulsion for the natural is embodied by the Leopolds, whose capitalistic overreach results in a lot of blood — maiming, goring, disembowelment, evisceration and head stomping all included.
The inevitable hunt for one of the unicorns ends predictably, all horn-based violence and sharp-toothed chomps. It's like if How to Train Your Dragon were an anti-capitalist diatribe rooted in magical realism and gratuitous violence. (Wait, it wasn't?) These macabre touches certainly add humour and gasps, but, ultimately, they detract from any message that the film attempts to present, the violence adding an air of irony that borders on cynicism.
Rudd as the bumbling, dorky dad gives a rather limp performance, rote and by-the-books. He seems tired and unenthused throughout. While Ortega does a great sullen teen, she also deserves so much more. An expressive, emotion-filled actor, she always gets placed in roles where she's upset and/or morose, a bad wig and heavy eye-liner selling her true talents short.
The best performance in the film comes from Barry's Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the Leopolds's long-suffering butler. While competently played, the Leopald clan unfortunately suffers from an abysmal characterization. Portrayed as entirely one-dimensional villains, driven by greed and monetary gain, hard-headed entrepreneurs who won't be convinced otherwise, the family delivers the film's biggest flaw.
As a statement on our modern fixation with selfishness, the film's depiction is lazy and uninspired, especially when no one can convince anyone else that their intentions are pure. Even with the Leopolds trying every manipulative trick in the book, it turns into a dialogical stalemate, the lack of communication between characters quickly becoming redundant. This impedes what little momentum the film had going for it, trying to play up the contradictions and incompatibilities for laughs and failing.
Ridley tells them what happens when you try to contain a unicorn; they try to convince her that what they're doing is right and good. Repeat ad infinitum. Idealism vs. greed. Gotcha.
While the film presents nature as mystical and mythical, and our destruction of it as unforgivable, it can't seem to make any noteworthy statements that support this claim. There's a mishandled and interrupted line about how the land they're on used to be Blackfoot territory before it was forcefully taken from them, but it's spoken by Odell, which immediately nullifies its sincerity. He really doesn't need our sympathy, so why Scharfman gives him this line is simply baffling.
Late in the proceedings, the film takes a strange, spiritual turn that feels entirely unnecessary. Even though the film outlines the loose connection between Jesus Christ and unicorns, particularly in medieval lore, the end feels preachy, even condescending. And, with everything we've experienced thus far, these late-film choices are insincere. It borders on psychedelic religiosity, and it's hard to say how many viewers will buy into that, if any. There's very little nuance, the whole affair feeling like a cloven kick to the head.
Still, from the unapologetic zaniness to the violence, Death of a Unicorn clearly has fun with the material, even if its commentary is derivative and flimsy at best. It's not great satire — it's barely coherent satire — but it's satire nonetheless, and that's something we desperately need right now: a quip and a joke to contextualize the insanity of our fractured, toppled world. While Death of a Unicorn doesn't entirely succeed in that respect, let's hope it inspires others to try and do the same.