Unquiet
Things

I really wanted to like this! I recall being so jazzed about the trailer! A24 doing a horror-comedy about murderous unicorns? Sign me up! But Death of a Unicorn is one of those movies where I kept waiting for it to click into place and it just… never did. One reviewer compared it to the overhypedness of Crumbl cookies, and as someone who always skips right past the Crumbl cookie ASMR videos (I’d rather watch people eat corndogs or sushi, or cheesy noodles and no I am not joking!) I think that was really the perfect analogy.

Paul Rudd and his daughter Jenna Ortega accidentally hit and kill a unicorn on their way to visit Rudd’s dying billionaire boss. The unicorn’s blood has magical healing properties, which the rich family immediately sees as a business opportunity. But the dead baby unicorn has very angry parents who show up for revenge, and they are not the Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper variety.

The problem is, I could never figure out what this movie was trying to be. Camp? Sincere creature feature? Eat-the-rich satire? It kept lunging at all of these, but never quite grasped hold of any of them. It was all over the place; one minute trying to be darkly funny, the next attempting genuine emotion about grief and family dysfunction, then suddenly we’re in full gore mode.

The “eat the rich” angle felt particularly tired. The film gestures vaguely at pharmaceutical greed and commodification, but doesn’t really say anything new, and the billionaire family is just broad-stroke villainous jerks without any real observation behind them. Ortega is playing Yet Another Angsty Teenager and is kinda blah. Rudd gets stuck as a pathetic yes-man who ignores everything his daughter says. The only person having any fun is Will Poulter as the trust-fund douchebag getting high on unicorn blood, and he’s the only one with an actual personality. The CGI unicorns look terrible in daylight, just grotesque cartoon horses. And the whole virgin/purity trope with Ortega feels out of step with a movie supposedly making modern social commentary, right?

There was one moment I loved, though: Rosamund Pike crouched behind a wall, hiding from the unicorns stalking through the mansion. She’s curled into herself and making herself small, trembling and terrified, with her eyes squeezed shut. In the midst of all the absurdity, it felt very human and real. It’s also the exact thing I do when I’m merging onto the highway, so maybe I just related.

But one good moment can’t save a movie. The most frustrating part is that there’s interesting unicorn lore buried in here, the idea that they’re fierce protectors of nature rather than gentle sparkle ponies. The movie could have done something with that. Instead, it just throws in some purple blood, a few gory kills, and calls it a day.

Death of a Unicorn had everything I should have loved, but it needed to pick a lane. Instead, it wandered all over the road, and I’m still not sure where we ended up, but it was a place both dumb and stupid.

What a waste of perfectly good murderous unicorns.

Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Four 2024 | Day Four 2023 | Day Four 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?