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They Shoot Unicorns, Don’t They

I find that these days we have to keep adjusting our barometers for what is too outrageous a thing to accept in a movie. Certainly when it comes to a movie like Death of a Unicorn which in part aims to satirize the ruling class of today. To some degree these figures do seem like caricatures, their selfishness and hypocrisy pretty brazen in ways that feel kind of lazy. And then you hear about war plans carried out in an unsecured social media chat-group by a bunch of high-ranking government officials talking like they’re frat boys and making The Death of Stalin look subtle, and you feel obligated to change your vantage point a little.
This doesn’t apply to all of the satire in Death of a Unicorn, the apparent debut film from Alex Scharfman, which is at times genuinely so overt as to be mildly condescending. But the particular actions and statements of its arrogant rich assholes leaps no bounds in believability for our current sad cultural climate. Not to mention it is very clear that Scharfman enjoys sending them up for the purpose of bringing them down later and cynically exploring the concept too of the modern pharmaceutical industry happening upon a cure for cancer.
He just chooses to do this off a premise of killer unicorns -not exactly a well-worn trope. But entering into that particular lions’ den is corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner, played by Paul Rudd, travelling up to an estate in the Canadian Rockies with his dispassionate daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) who has been resentful and emotionally distant from him since the sudden death of her mother. On the way, their car accidentally hits an animal, revealed to be a unicorn; and though they attempt to hide the roadkill initially their hosts soon discover it, along with the apparent healing properties of its blood which they seek immediately to exploit, to Elliot’s meek support and Ridley’s fearful disapproval.
In getting to this point there are a few elements in Scharfman’s script that do come off contrived or superfluous in one way or another. A big one is the relationship Ridley forms with the unicorns from touching the horn of the one they hit which sends her on some psychedelic journey of sensation and enlightenment. However all she gets from the apparent psychic connection is a sense of fear over their true violent nature and feelings which could easily be presupposed or determined by more natural ways. There is also the consistent refusal on Elliot’s part to listen to his daughter and forego being dragged into the madcap ideas and actions of his irrational boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). If it weren’t for Rudd’s natural likability, the character might be insufferable in his stubbornness at times, and it feels blatantly manufactured for the sake of a typical family arc.
Yet Rudd and Ortega have good believable chemistry, even in the cynicism that crosses between them. There is a good-natured tenor to Elliot (typical of a lot of Rudd characters really) that keeps the audience invested in him and his relationship with Ridley. She is a more active character and Ortega plays her with a decent eccentricity in her responses to the craziness around her. But the Leopolds make the bigger splash, particularly Grant and Will Poulter, who play up their archetypes to a very fun degree. Opaque though it may be, Grant's bombast over both the sudden remission of his cancer and the gold mine that is a potential widespread cure for it is delicious. And Poulter nails the character of the brash, confidently deluded trust-fund kid, always convinced he is the brightest and most amusing person in the room. The funniest moments of the movie are almost all carried by Poulter tapping with absurdity into the candour and gracelessness of the weirdest rich dweebs in the world today.
The contrast between these characters and voice of reason Ridley is pretty stark, as she researches the mythology around unicorns while they plan on which people to prioritize in the distribution of this miracle cure. And while it is crass and blunt, it is still a relatively honest assessment of circumstance akin to what we are starting to see play out more and more in a public sphere. Power being exploited nakedly by oligarchs who have dived into cartoon villainy. If anyone, Ridley feels a touch more unbelievable in her quickly-developed expertise on unicorns, absorbing and dispensing a ton of very conveniently relevant information. Even Odell's Livingstone outfit when embarking on his very ill-advised unicorn hunt doesn't feel all that far-fetched.
The unicorns are perhaps a different matter. With the elaborate outlines of their horns, gargantuan size, and the addition of jagged teeth that more and more separate them from horses, they are fairly uniquely drawn but aren't very tangible CGI monsters. Especially in daylight and especially the young one that Elliot kills, which looks very animated in some scenes, even as an unmoving corpse. However their lack of reality doesn't much take away from the visceral carnage they wreak when the parents descend on the estate in seeming vengeance for their child.
And it's not that the violence of the horror is believable necessarily, but that it is gleefully brutal in a way that matches the heightened satirical tone. A couple of the human deaths are very predictable, but there is still something fun to how outrageous they are. You can't say that Scharfman goes light on his whole 'killer unicorn' premise. The movie plays pretty well too with the reaction to these monsters in the final act, from the scapegoating of put-upon family butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan), to the highly dubious tactics of defence from Shepherd, and even the standard cathartic beats between Elliot and Ridley -substantively shallow though it may be, it is played genuinely by Rudd and Ortega, who lend enough credence to the climactic sequence that you can overlook a major time disparity between the start and end of the chaos.
Obviously an oversight like this shows the movie isn't seamless in execution -Scharfman's lack of experience shows through now and again. But his critical points still stand and the film's action and humour are largely effective, thanks to the movie's exuberant cast and a pervading sense of wicked fun. Death of a Unicorn is strange and silly and a little bit scary. Maybe it doesn't quite have the magic, but it makes for a good time regardless.

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