Death Of A Unicorn (15)

Widowed corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner drives into the countryside with his college student daughter, Ridley, to attend an urgent summit called by his terminally ill boss, Odell Leopold. En route to the Leopold mansion in the middle of a nature reserve, Elliot fails to pay attention to the road and hits a white-furred "horse-like mammalia". Father and daughter arrive traumatised at the Leopold complex, with a dead unicorn in the boot of their car.

LondonNet Film Review

Death Of A Unicorn (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Popular culture has appropriated the unicorn as a rainbow-coloured metaphor for a highly desirable individual, who dares to stand out from the herd. Writer-director Alex Scharfman’s comedy horror rifles through literature and art dating back hundreds of years to reaffirm the unicorn as a ferocious beast steeped in myth, which is capable of wondrous healing and can only be tamed by a virtuous and pure-hearted maiden. Young women of such noble heritage are even rarer than horned beasts in Scharfman’s gory picture, which unleashes a family of unicorns to enthusiastically impale human victims on their spiralling protrusions…

Characters marked for death are glaringly obvious: they either attempt to kill the magical creatures for personal gain, and consequently ‘deserve’ a grim fate, or foolishly place press their heads against a door or wooden panelling to listen for the sound of approaching hooves and are rewarded with tapered bone in their brain matter. The quality of the digital trickery, which melds the creatures with live-action elements and human actors, varies wildly. Any scenes where unicorns are at full gallop or stalking prey in domestic settings, like the velociprators in Jurassic Park, are especially jarring.

Widowed corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) drives into the countryside with his college student daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), to attend an urgent summit called by his terminally ill boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant). The billionaire philanthropist has exhausted vast resources to find a medical cure for cancer and is looking to put pen to paperwork to officially confirm Elliot’s role in continuing his legacy when he is gone, under the aegis of Odell’s wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and spoilt son Shepard (Will Poulter).

En route to the Leopold mansion in the middle of a nature reserve, Elliot fails to pay attention to the road and hits a white-furred “horse-like mammalia”. Father and daughter arrive traumatised at the Leopold complex, with a dead unicorn in the boot of their car. They are greeted by Odell’s personal assistant Shaw (Jessica Hynes) and long-suffering butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan). Soon after, cries fill the night-time air and the Kintners and Leopolds deduce the deceased was part of a herd.

Death Of A Unicorn is an entertaining but tonally uneven romp through superstition, which sacrifices the privilege and pompous to ancient beasts that deserve to be protected not exploited. Ortega’s outcast is the only wholly likeable character, forging an unspoken bond to the magical creatures by touching a glowing horn shortly before her father wields a tyre iron to put one injured animal out of its misery. Intentionally overblown death sequences and jump scares are slathered in viscera to elicit gasps of shock and disgust. Scharfman’s film may not be a unicorn in common parlance but it’s not destined for the knacker’s yard either.

– Jo Planter