Here’s what you need to know about Death of a Unicorn: It’s a modern fairytale, replete with arch characterizations and storylines straight out of a Brothers Grimm collection. After suffering a grievous loss, our underdog heroes are forced into a situation by more moneyed and evil superiors that makes them consider their principles carefully. When the supernatural enters the picture, the power usually goes to the kind-hearted, aiding them in the resolution of the story and the attainment of their happily ever after. Or so one would hope.
Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn speaks to our fears of destroying something greater than ourselves. With widowed father Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), it’s their accidental (and then non-accidental) pre-title killing of a unicorn in the middle of a wilderness preserve. More than this, it’s Elliot coping with Ridley distancing herself from him after losing her mother. On the flipside, Ridley has to watch as Elliot bows and scrapes to keep his job, no matter if it puts him at odds with her. For Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and son Shepard (Will Poulter), it’s Odell’s pending death from cancer and needing to make sure their pharma company will survive, which is why they’ve brought Elliot – their in-house counsel – and Ridley to their palatial estate.
However, as fairytales go, these things get sorted out through circumstances way beyond their control, which is where the darker side of Grimm’s stories comes out to play. It’s also where you can almost see Scharfman and company start to tap their fingertips together and grin at the paces they put their characters through. The openness of the Leopolds’ castle-like retreat – including the surrounding wilderness reserve they’ve bought as a way to greenwash their company – lends itself easily to isolation, which is how Scharfman chooses to get his characters in a position to witness the unicorn’s parents exacting their revenge.
The satirical bent to how Scharfman goes from point A to B to C lies in watching the Leopolds try to manipulate everything that comes at them to their advantage. Ridley’s feeling sick? Take the opportunity to show her and Elliot that they’re compassionate people while ordering their staff around like slaves. Elliot wants to advance? Shame him into doing things he would never do, especially in front of his daughter. Dead unicorn? Use its blood to cure everything and make money. Dead unicorn’s parents are breaking into the compound and killing staff members? Hunt them for their curative properties, never mind that they’re mythical, mystical creatures. It’s both hilarious and horrifying to see the Leopolds operate in a similar manner to real-life analogs in the news these days, stepping on those beneath them without impunity or a second thought. Anything they want, they get, whether it’s a drink, a bathrobe, the horn from the unicorn – everything and everyone are their playthings and are only any good for serving their purposes or making them richer.
Richard E. Grant can always be counted on to give manic roles like these 110% (I still stand by Hudson Hawk and all its glory), and it’s fun to see Téa Leoni and Will Poulter try to counter him by being a soothing voice of cunning reason and a conniving opportunist, respectively. All of them are perfectly cast as characters so polluted by power and wealth but desperately trying to maintain even the slightest “genuinely caring humans” façade. This trio of actors absolutely nails the air and manner of people who profess to understand others while walking all over them, and Scharfman has us wholly rooting for the unicorns to have messy meetings with the Leopolds.
As the more relatable folks on the other side, Jenna Ortega has us in her corner from the opening frames as Ridley, a college student on the outs with Elliot, who’s more wrapped up in doing his overlords’ bidding than being her dad. Even though he’s trying to do what he can to make sure she has what she wants, he’s not really taking into account what she needs, which is something money can’t buy. She needs him to just be someone reliable, not this corporate kiss-butt (props if you know that reference) that she sees bending his principles to please his masters. They’re the pure-hearted maiden and put-upon father team you read about in fairytales, and a better pairing there could not be. Paul Rudd is at his bumbling, good-intentioned best, trying to walk the line between being a father and serving the Leopolds; it seems like this role was written specifically for him, as it plays to his meek strengths while also asking him to hold some of his stronger moments in reserve for when the time’s right.
Taken as something out of a Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve story, Death of a Unicorn hits all the right marks. It’s equal parts morality play, cautionary tale, and horror movie; in every one of these descriptors, the Leopolds are consistently the villains, not the unicorns, and that fascinates me. Taken at a thousand-foot view, the unicorns represent nature protecting itself from their disrespectful aggressors who can’t – or willingly won’t – appreciate these creatures for what they are and leave them alone, choosing only the disastrous path of use, use, use. The Leopolds claim they love and would do anything for humanity, but only if the price is right, and Alex Scharfman wants to see what it looks like when something outside humanity’s limits defends itself against people like this. It might be a little on the nose at times, but damn, Death of a Unicorn hits in all the right places.
