Back when I started reviewing films, many industry folk seemed to see horror comedies as box office poison. The conventional wisdom was that fear and laughter didn’t appeal to the same audiences, so movies such as The Cabin in the Woods and the Fright Night remake (both 2011) didn’t get the push they deserved. Never mind that horror fans adored the wacky Evil Dead series — that was seen as a niche phenomenon.
In 2017, Jordan Peele’s Get Out changed everything by demonstrating that satirical, socially conscious horror could sell a ton of tickets. Last year, Terrifier 3 grossed $90 million with a combination of laughs and extreme, unrated gore. The ascendance of horror comedy dovetailed with that of the “meme movie” (Cocaine Bear, M3GAN).
Both those trends bring us Death of a Unicorn. This creature feature from edgy horror distributor A24 asks us to be afraid of a mythical beast more often associated with medieval tapestries, spiritual purity and crystal figurines than with fear and trembling.
The deal
Widowed attorney Elliot (Paul Rudd) hopes to secure his family’s future by serving as a legal proxy for dying Big Pharma billionaire Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). But to seal the deal, Elliot and his sullen teenage daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), must impress the client at a weekend retreat at the Leopold family’s mountain lodge, deep in a nature preserve.
En route, their car collides with, you guessed it, a unicorn. One touch of the creature’s horn gives Ridley a literal case of galaxy brain. She’s horrified when her dad bashes the wounded unicorn’s head in with a tire iron, spattering shimmery mauve blood everywhere.
At the estate, father and daughter discover that the unicorn’s blood has miraculous curative properties, wiping away their allergies and acne. With dollar signs flashing in their eyes, the Leopold family calls in a team of scientists to extract the creature’s essence. Ridley, who’s been googling unicorn lore, warns that exploiting a magical animal has consequences, but the others dismiss her as a bleeding heart.
Too late, the Leopolds and their guests will learn that there are other unicorns out there. Bigger ones. And they’re pissed off.
Will you like it?
Death of a Unicorn has one major thing going for it: the prospect of seeing unicorns attack detestable rich people. While the CGI unicorns are far from awe-inspiring, the actors playing the victims give it their all.
Always wonderfully over the top, Grant basically reprises the self-absorbed patriarch role he played in Saltburn, this time with Téa Leoni as his spacey blond wife. As their smug nepo-baby offspring, who’d rather take drugs than make them, Will Poulter gets some of the best lines. And Anthony Carrigan (three-time Emmy nominee for “Barry”) steals many scenes as the butler who has to put up with these entitled asses.
If you want more from the movie than obvious satirical targets being targeted, however, you’re out of luck. The screenplay by director Alex Scharfman, making his feature debut, hits all the expected tropes without surprising us. Plot points that seem obvious early on are treated as if they were major twists. Long, tiresome scenes showcase underdrawn characters who are clearly only there to be killed off later.
If we could get invested in the protagonists’ evolving relationship, it would be easier to excuse the movie’s longueurs. But Rudd, so slyly charismatic in the right role, comes across as a superficial yes-man here. Elliot’s excuse for sucking up to the increasingly evil Leopolds (providing for Ridley’s future) is so wafer thin that I kept waiting for his heel turn, yet apparently we’re supposed to find his bad choices understandable. (Does a corporate lawyer have no other options?) On the other end of the scale, Ridley repeats the same “woke teen” talking points over and over. Her moral superiority over the other characters may matter a lot to unicorns — recall that only a “pure maiden” can subdue the beasts — but it doesn’t make her interesting.
Once the unicorns return with a vengeance, the movie transforms from a satire into an action-packed, surprisingly gory monster movie. Some of the kills are creative enough to be fun, but the nighttime action sequences are muddy and chaotic. Aside from one long tracking shot that emphasizes the tireless eagerness of the Leopolds to exploit everything exploitable, the movie has little to distinguish it visually. While the unicorns’ design reflects medieval influence, and one of them has an amusingly phallic horn, they never seem real or solid enough to be scary.
“Killer unicorns” is a great concept for a horror comedy, but a concept isn’t enough on its own. By the end, my hopes for the movie were as skewered or trampled as much of the cast.
If you like this, try…
Krampus (2015; Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Holiday traditions are right up there with unicorns as something that Western culture reveres as wholesome, so there’s a certain subversive kick to this horror comedy about a Christmas demon.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011; Philo, Prime, rentable): Drew Goddard set the blueprint for the 21st-century horror comedy with this self-aware slasher, which mocked genre tropes while doing interesting world building of its own.
Cuckoo (2024; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): If you’re a fan of humor-tinged horror set in mountain retreats, but you’d prefer something weirder, try Tilman Singer’s stylish movie in which birdsong takes on a new meaning.