Is there anything sadder than seeing a unicorn die? These majestic (imaginary) beasts represent the original endangered species — something innocent and pure that may once have existed, but certainly doesn’t today, from which we can conclude that they must have been snuffed out by mankind’s cruelty.
Repeated across the centuries in art and lore, this painful sacrifice inevitably reveals something essential about human nature. That was true of both “The Last Unicorn” and Ridley Scott’s “Legend” back in the ’80s, and it’s been the elegant creatures’ allegorical purpose for at least 500 years, since the world-famous “Hunt of the Unicorn” tapestries were made. Now comes writer-director Alex Scharfman’s funny-sad A24 satire “Death of a Unicorn,” which fits squarely within the indie studio’s bizart-house brand, using the title tragedy as license to make a highly eccentric and unapologetically grisly horror movie.
Gone are the elegant white horses you might have doodled as a child, replaced here by chunky, Clydesdale-shaped monsters with sharp teeth, clawed hooves and a corkscrew head-spear, ready to tear their victims limb from limb. Set in the present among an endearingly deplorable circle of self-anointed elites, Scharfman’s bold debut opens with a morally compromised lawyer, Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd), striking a unicorn with his rental car en route to a rich client’s remote compound.
His daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) — one of just two characters in this iniquitous ensemble in possession of something that resembles a conscience — is understandably traumatized by the event. Rushing to the injured animal’s aid, Ridley makes a mystical connection with the pony-sized steed by touching its glowing horn. It’s a moment of bonding rudely interrupted by her father, who bludgeons the animal to death with a tire iron, spraying indigo blood all over.
Elliot is late for his appointment with Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), an ailing pharmaceutical honcho entering the final chapter of his fight against cancer, so the lawyer hastily cleans up and does his best to downplay the accident when he arrives at his employer’s enormous compound — a modern-day castle, situated in the middle of a wildlife preserve. Unicorns don’t die so easily, it turns out, which causes quite the inconvenience for Elliot when the corpse starts thrashing in the back of his vehicle.
You’d think his hosts would be upset, and they are for a moment, though that passes as soon as Elliot realizes that unicorn blood has magical healing properties — a discovery that energizes Odell in every way. Not only does his cancer disappear upon contact, but the Leopolds stand to make millions marketing this treatment to their elite client list. So far, so cynical, as Scharfman skewers the ruthlessly profit-minded impulses that drive nearly all these characters. Only Ridley seems concerned about the animal, unlearning everything people assume they know about unicorns to better understand what they’re dealing with.
Analyzing the legendary unicorn tapestries hanging at the Met Cloisters in New York (augmented here by a gory new panel that depicts the suddenly fearsome animals disemboweling and impaling their aggressors), Ridley concludes that unicorns aren’t nearly as benevolent as most people think. And she’s right, as we soon see when the fallen foal’s parents come looking for their road-killed baby. Come to find, that spiral horn isn’t merely decorative, but doubles as a gnarly weapon, with which these two larger and far more intimidating-looking unicorns impale their prey.
Around this point, “Death of a Unicorn” makes an abrupt shift from witty class satire — something akin to “Saltburn,” with its posh location and self-absorbed aristocracy — to full-blown monster movie. Scharfman draws from myriad genre films, but seems most indebted to “Jurassic Park,” updating Michael Crichton’s rudimentary critique of capitalist excess and Steven Spielberg’s penchant for tease-the-creature suspense. The combination paid off to spontaneous eruptions of applause from the audience at the SXSW premiere anytime the unicorns dispatched one of the Leopolds, which just goes to show that a fed-up public continues to view executing pharm-oligarchs as fair payback.
Scharfman’s script cleverly taps into any number of easy-target frustrations swirling in the zeitgeist at the moment, using Ortega’s appropriately indignant character to illustrate how enlightened millennials feel ignored and unheard by their elders. With the exception of the Leopolds’ beleaguered butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan), all the other adults are actively destroying the world for Ridley’s generation, and she isn’t shy about expressing her concerns — which the Leopolds ignore at their own peril.
Meanwhile, Odell and his potential heirs, callous Belinda (Téa Leoni) and sleazeball Shepard (scene-stealer Will Poulter), take the discovery of a new species to unethical extremes. Odell orders Griff to prepare him a still-purple unicorn steak (the rarest of delicacies, in every sense), while ex-addict Shepard simply can’t resist snorting the powder obtained from grinding the coveted horn. Poulter plays those scenes for laughs, but it’s hard not to think about the way rhinoceroses are still being killed for the perceived therapeutic value of their horns.
None of this is easy to watch for audiences who love animals, even if these unicorns are dark and fairly menacing in their appearance — not to mention perfectly capable of defending themselves. As first features go, “Death of a Unicorn” is considerably more ambitious and imaginative than so much of what studios greenlight these days, which goes a fair distance to excuse some of its flaws. There’s a sense here that the unicorns come out of nowhere. Granted, they’ve been hiding in the Leopold wilderness preserve, but Scharfman does a better job upending apocryphal notions of unicorns than he does communicating how this trio behaves. Hint: Their dynamic puts Elliot and Ridley’s strained parent-child relationship into perspective.
The weakest element here is also the film’s most essential — namely, how the unicorns look. In the four decades since “Legend,” landmark advances in visual effects have made it possible to animate whatever the mind can dream up, and yet, these computer-generated horse-monsters come of looking inconsistent and unconvincing. Their “existence” gives Scharfman the chance to rip into the rich and those who indulge them, but the film’s creature designs are simply too cartoony to intimidate. Still, it’s exciting to see unicorns brought back to the big screen, whatever the form, while Scharfman’s extensive research into their legacy ensures that his subversive take won’t soon be forgotten.