Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Death Of A Unicorn' - Impale the rich!
Considering the times we live in and how we're faced with constantly escalating global crises, the lunatic behaviour of multi-billionaires and the out-of-touch elites shining by their mediocrity on a daily basis, it's hardly surprising that the ability to tolerate the rich has become as rare as... well, finding a unicorn in the wild.
This has been mirrored through the zeitgeist-flooding trend of Eat The Rich movies, with the likes of
Parasite
,
Triangle of Sadness
,
Knives Out
,
The Menu
and
Saltburn
- all delivering some cathartic goods. TV hasn't fared too badly either, with the ubiquity of shows like
Succession
and
White Lotus
also utilising satire to expose the downfall of morally loathsome one percenters.
A24 clearly wanted in on the Rich People Are Shit action and tapped writer-director Alex Scharfman to deliver the goods. The trouble is that clued-up audience members now expect their late-stage capitalism satires to be scathing, original and potent... And sadly, Scharfman's feature debut can't even get the balance right between horror and comedy.
Death Of A Unicorn
A24
Death Of A Unicorn
follows workaholic Elliot (Paul Rudd), a compliance lawyer for a pharmaceutical company run by dying CEO Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). He's dragging his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) to his billionaire tycoon boss' luxurious estate, thinking he's about to be promoted to the executive board.
On the drive to the secluded retreat, the father-daughter duo accidentally hit a unicorn with their rental car.
The words 'Death Of A Unicorn' immediately appear on screen - a perfectly timed and goofy monster B-movie nod that promises much.
With no place to dump the corpse, they bring their roadkill to the retreat - but not before Ridley manages to establish a psychic connection with the creature by touching its horn.
Despite their best efforts to keep the creature under wraps, the unicorn is discovered by the Leopolds – Odell, his glamorous wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their dipshit-in-stripey-pleated-shorts heir Shepard (Will Poulter). And when they realize that the unicorn's blood may contain magical healing properties, the terminally ill patriarch and his Sackler-shaped family waste no time in poking and draining the poor beast for profit. A lucrative new drug is at stake and nothing will stop them from harnessing the creature's regenerative talents.
Little do they know that unicorns may have magic blood, but they're not all rainbows and cuddles. They're ferocious legends, and if one goes down, you can bet its family will muster enough vengeful determination to make Michael Myers soil himself...
Death Of A Unicorn
A24
From the premise alone, there's plenty to love about
Death Of A Unicorn
. Caricatures of pharma arseholes getting bloodily impaled while a fractured father-daughter dynamic gets healed in the process. It sounds like something Roger Corman would have saluted.
Frustratingly,
Death Of A Unicorn
settles for being very predictable and unsure of what it wants to be. It's not camp or irreverent enough to be hilarious; too thinly drawn to function as a proper takedown of the resource-hoarding ultra wealthy; and it lacks the appropriate amount of on-screen gore to make it a bloody B-movie blast.
In its defense, some of the slasher kills are funny, and the Leopolds have a blast - especially Will Poulter who stands out as the feckless and entitled Shepard. His Ted Talk line delivery, as well as his plan to defeat the unicorns in the 'marketplace of ideas', do make up for some of the film's shortcomings. However, we've seen the ever-reliable Paul Rudd play this type of affable and bumbling character a million times, and Jenna Ortega is once again lumped in the archetypal Gen-Zer category, spouting suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding lines like 'Philanthropy is reputation-laundering for the oligarchy'. She clearly has more range and needs to be cast in roles that don't feel like retreads of her detached-youth turns in
Wednesday
and
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
.
There are worst ways of spending 107 minutes than
Death Of A Unicorn
, especially when rich and exploitative narcissists get slashed, gutted and stabbed by crazed unicorns. It's certainly not the crushing bore that was
Cocaine Bear
. However, much like Elizabeth Banks' 2023 'Bear Trips Balls On Nose Candy' dud, A24 needed a surer grasp when it came to elevating the equally promising pitch of 'What If Unicorns Started Skewering The Rich?' to satirical heights.
This just needed more bite. Sorry, more "girthsome" horn.
Death Of A Unicorn
is out now.
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