Death Of A Unicorn ★★

Released: 4th April 2025

Director: Alex Scharfman

Starring: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter

The ‘eat the rich’ narrative has become commonplace cinema over the last few years —Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and Blink Twice being recent examples. In A24’s Death of a Unicorn, director Alex Scharfman takes the theme quite literally when mythical unicorns actually eat and terrorise the rich after they mess with powers beyond their control.

Generally speaking, the unicorn has always been portrayed in folklore as a creature of great wonder and majesty. From pearl-white tufts of fur to the mighty horse-like figure and magical horn, Scharfman envisions them much the same in his debut feature too. The only difference? They’re not cuddly companions of magic but, rather, violent monsters with a bloodlust. So when father-daughter duo Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) accidentally run one over on their way to a remote estate – the home of Elliot’s billionaire boss and his family of megalomaniacs – they haphazardly finish the job and hurl the beast into the trunk of their car.

At the property, the pair struggle to hide their panic and the Leopolds – Odell (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their son Shep (Will Poulter) – find the body and see it as an opportunity to exploit the healing properties of the unicorn’s horn for immeasurable wealth. But “if you mess with nature, it tends to mess back”, and their discovery incites chaos as the mansion is soon swarmed by bloodthirsty unicorns looking to settle the score.

This is, expectedly, where the film is at its best; Scharfman gleefully dolls out the destruction from brutal impalings to bodies being torn apart or heads being stomped on, never short of creative ways for these beasts to maim their victims. The gore flows thick and fast in the last twenty or so minutes, with the deaths satisfyingly misanthropic after much build-up. The iffy unicorn CGI is made up for with buckets of blood and severed limbs and it’s all a good bit of fun. The issue is with the rest of the film, which trudges along to get to the savagery. The characters are sketched as Rich People archetypes: ‘they’re bad, selfish people who are going to get what’s coming to them’ is about the extent of the film’s depth, there purely as fodder for kills.

Even the dynamic between Elliot and Ridley, there to ground the film with a sense of humanity, lacks any emotional nuance, whilst the performances themselves don’t add any conviction either to these caricatures. Perhaps the only one who commits to the bit enough is Poulter – Shep’s one-liners bring the belly share of the laughs. But the script isn’t funny enough as a comedy or dark enough to go full horror, treading a middle ground that doesn’t commit to anything well. Despite a few fun moments and solid kills, Death of a Unicorn lacks the thematic and emotional bite this story needs. Like the Leopolds themselves, maybe Scharfman got too excited by the promise of unicorns. And perhaps this would have been better served as a short film.