‘Death of a Unicorn’ is an underwhelming horror satire
It gets some good shots in at the super-rich and the Sacklers, but that can’t save it from bad CGI and misuse of top stars.
Death of a Unicorn combines a razor-sharp satire, of the ultra-rich generally and of the Sackler family in particular, with a particularly witless monster movie. It’s almost jarring how stark the split is, between what works and what doesn’t.
Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, the film has one of those high concepts where it’s pretty obvious where it’s going essentially from the beginning.
We’re first introduced to Elliot (Paul Rudd) who works as a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company and is also the single father to a college-aged daughter (Jenna Ortega). As he’s a corporate stooge and she’s what some would refer to as a woke undergraduate, they appear to have a strained relationship.
On their way to a meeting at the remote estate owned by the company’s controlling family, they hit something in the road. But it’s not a deer, but rather a unicorn- one that appears to have magical healing powers. It also has parents, who are eager to rescue their unicorn child.
Having not read a word about the film before seeing it, I knew exactly where the plot was going before they even arrived at the estate, ten minutes in: Is the family going to turn out to be cartoonishly evil and amoral, like the Sacklers? Yes. Are they going to try to exploit the unicorns’ healing powers in their work as a drug company? Yes. Is Rudd going to be tempted to go along with his bosses’ evil, but then think better of it, because he’s Paul Rudd? Yes.
The movie’s one saving grace, though, is the Leopold family, led by patriarch Richard E. Grant, his wife Tea Leoni, and their layabout bro son Will Poulter. They’re played well, and written well, and a super-sharp parody of the Sacklers, and the greedy rich in general, up to and including the veneer of insincere philanthropy. I was not expecting the Fen-Phen joke. They even have entertaining henchmen, led by Anthony Corrigan, who played NoHo Hank on Barry.
It’s just a shame that almost every aspect of the film is a failure.
Neither Rudd nor Ortega is anywhere near their best, and their plot has no tension because we always know exactly where it’s going. For their plot to have any stakes, we have to believe that Rudd might go along with his nefarious bosses, and Rudd is just too much of a instinctive good guy for that to be a live possability. As for Ortega, who has been hot property of late, she’s given a nothing character to play.
The CGI of the unicorns is subpar, the nighttime action scenes are poorly photographed and hard to follow. And the film seems to be making up the rules of what the unicorns can do, and what powers they have, as they go along.
It’s a shame because the Sackler/Purdue Pharmaceuticals debacle is prime for a big-screen feature treatment when until now it’s merely been the subject of a half-dozen documentaries and two different scripted streaming miniseries (I’m partial to Dopesick, the Hulu one where Michael Stuhlbarg played Richard Sackler.)