Death of a Unicorn (2025 | USA | 104 minutes | Alex Scharfman)

Make no mistake: Like the mythical beast name-dropped in its title, Death of a Unicorn is one strange creature.

Simply put, the newest release from respected indie distributor A24 feels like some cinematic Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from pieces of about 12 other movies. The end result can’t be pegged as great (or even good, really). But its solid cast, surplus of weird disparate ingredients, and lurching, seemingly involuntary tonal schizophrenia somehow render it compulsively watchable. 

Corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) works for a massive pharmaceutical company, and he’s summoned by his boss, CEO Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), for a crisis management meeting and the promise of a promotion. Elliot and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) both make the trek to Leopold’s remote mansion/compound in a rented SUV, and the journey quickly brings out tensions between the two that’ve been exacerbated by the recent passing of Elliot’s wife, Ridley’s mom. 

During some heated bickering between dad and kid, Elliot’s attention is pulled away from the road, and he winds up hitting a large animal. With its equine features and single large horn, the mammalian accident victim’s obviously a unicorn. Elliot puts the mortally-wounded beast out of its misery with a tire iron, and he and Ridley stash its corpse in the back of the car, hot-footing it to the meeting. Upon arrival, however, it’s discovered that the unicorn isn’t as dead as it initially appears, and the creature’s blood holds curative properties that the terminally ill Leopold and his greedy family look to exploit to the hilt.

So on the face of it, Death of a Unicorn apes any one of a dozen family dramas in which evil rich people plot to destroy or despoil an innocent animal or animals, while compassionate protagonists fight for said animals’ lives/safety—think 101 Dalmatians meeting E.T. and turning into a gore-splattered siege-horror variation on Jurassic Park. 

If that elevator pitch sounds odd, it’s because it is. And corralling all of those disparate elements into a cohesive whole would pose the most daunting of challenges to anybody. Not surprisingly, Scharfman (a veteran producer making his feature directorial debut) doesn’t quite thread the needle here. 

The main problem stems from Death of a Unicorn’s inability to really commit to a lane tonally. Scharfman works the sentiment with such overweening earnestness that it’s almost annoying, only to slingshot into intermittently effective spoofery as the Leopold clan—Odell, his wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and his son Shep (Will Poulter)—obliviously pursue unicorn-fueled profit and immortality. Then when the angry parents of the slain-but-not-totally-dead unicorn arrive to wreak bloody havoc, we’re thrust face-first into a straight-up horror movie replete with graphic skull-crushing, limb-rending, and horn-impaling. The tonal inconsistency’s kneecapped further by the fact that Elliot’s such a cowardly corporate bootlicker through so much of the movie that even the ever-likable Rudd fails to keep him from being irritating. 

That said, fragments of Death of a Unicorn do land. Ortega, Hollywood’s go-to Acerbic but Empathetic Goth Teen, remains an appealing presence, and Ridley’s more than likably spunky enough to counter her mealy-mouthed chicken of a dad. Leoni and Poulter in particular elicit most of the movie’s big laughs as a hyper-efficient calculating matriarch and her spoiled, numbingly insensitive progeny, respectively. And there’s most assuredly some warped entertainment value in watching unicorns impale, dismember, and stomp the skulls of shitty rich people and their armed security team. 

In the end, the lumbering, shambling patchwork beast that is Death of a Unicorn never assembles its heart, humor, and horror into anything that remotely holds together, but at least it’s never dull. 

Death of a Unicorn opens in theaters today, March 28. Image courtesy A24.