Death of a Unicorn review: Horror comedy should’ve been scarier and funnier

When you think of unicorns, you think of big-eyed, shining creatures with pure hearts and great love, adorned across children’s duvet covers and kindergarten backpacks.

You tend not to think of murderous monsters disembowelling you with their horns.

Death of a Unicorn wants to dispel the fuzzy-wuzzy reputation and restore the old folkloric tales. It’s an interesting conceit, to take something fake with A+ brand appeal and invert that into a horror-thriller-comedy.

The movie heavily references a series of seven artworks called The Unicorn Tapestries, dated to the late 13th century and said to be made in the Netherlands. They now hang in The Cloisters in New York City, which is part of The Met.

These elaborate tapestries tell a different story to My Little Pony. While it’s open to interpretation, the general narrative depicts a medieval society which hunts and then captures a unicorn, hoping to exploit its magic powers and purity.

The animal fights back at one point, impaling one of the hunters’ dogs, but is ultimately subdued by a maiden and then chained inside a pen.

There have been arguments that the tapestries are a metaphor for the resurrection of Christ and other weighty themes, but Death of a Unicorn takes it more literally – bad humans, defensive animal.

It mostly works. Well, at least it’s entertaining, even if it’s not nearly funny enough.

The central character is Ridley (Jenna Ortega), a young woman who is semi-estranged from her dad Elliot (Paul Rudd). Elliot is a student of the Tom Wambsgans school of corporate toadying and is on the verge of being promoted by the Leopolds, a pharmaceutical family.

Daddy Leopold, Odell (Richard E. Grant), is dying from cancer, but before he kicks it, he wants his family, wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and son Shepard (Will Poulter), to meet Elliot and his family, so he and Ridley are off to the Leopolds’ sprawling estate up north, nestled in a vast national park.

On the way, the two accidentally hit a baby unicorn with their car, which delights the Leopolds once they discover its blood and horn has restorative properties. Pharma billionaires are going to do what they do, and Death of a Unicorn aims to be a parable for the greed and elitism of the one percent.

Of course they’re going to sell off the vials of unicorn horn dust to their mates for “two-and-a-half” – although whether this was millions or billions is not clear.

The obvious contention is, who are the real monsters – the exploitative rich arseholes or the two killer unicorns who descend on the estate to reclaim their child?

Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn flirts with rather than leans into the absurdist hijinks tone it was striving for. It could’ve gone bigger, freakier and more ridiculous, especially the death scenes.

When you have a cast that includes Rudd, Ortega, Poulter, Grant, Leoni, Sunita Mani and Anthony Carrigan, all with the capacity to deliver some killer one-liners, you want them to have more of them.

The more the story progressed into the horror, the more it forgot to bring the funny, although there are moments, such as when Poulter’s himbo character starts snorting horn dust and goes on the world’s most epic coke binge.

Death of a Unicorn operates on a level of “it’s fine”, without landing any knock-out blows.

Rating: 3/5

Death of a Unicorn is in cinemas on April 10