Death of a Unicorn: A gorily idiotic skewering of the super-rich
Death of a Unicorn wants to skewer the privilege of the 0.01 per cent – just like The Menu did, and Glass Onion did, and Saltburn, Blink Twice and Triangle of Sadness. Using an alicorn – unicorn's horn – to go about this, in the goriest ways imaginable, makes it the most outlandish of these splashy satires.
But it also strongly suggests the end of the road has been reached with this lazy vogue for disembowelling the rich. Indeed, it panics when coming to that very realisation, and tonally swerves off a cliff.
Writer-director Alex Scharfman earns credit for a first hour studded with laughs, as does Will Poulter, the pick of the cast as an unbearably pampered heir apparent. Some snappy comedy gets served, but the horror end of the equation is shocking mainly for being so basic. Espying the executive producer credit for Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) only makes it more conspicuous that A24 have gone so calculatedly downmarket with this one.
You'll also need to get past a grossly distressing start, especially if prolonged harm to animals on screen – even mythical ones – is in any way a worry. It's hard to come around ever again to Elliot (an uneasy Paul Rudd), a widowed lawyer headed to a country estate with his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), after his reaction to running over a unicorn foal. (Their existence here surprises the characters as much as it would us.) He bludgeons it savagely with a tire-iron – less to put it out of its misery than get the poor creature off the road and hide the evidence.
Unfortunately, it isn't dead, and kicks off enough of a frenzy in the back of an SUV to alert the entire household of their host, a cancer-riddled Big Pharma mogul named Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant). When it transpires that the beast's horn has healing properties, dollar signs leap into everyone's eyes except Ridley's. Her appalled Gen Z principles are merely an irritant to the Leopold clan, meaning they shush her – with her dad's acquiescence – while swiftly hatching a battle plan.
It's good to see Téa Leoni, always such a spry comic actress, back in films for the first time in 14 years as Odell's wife, a charitable foundation queen who knows which side her bread is buttered on. Poulter steals many scenes as their dreadful son Shepard – indeed, already funny lines ('Gloss is gauche!', he barks about printer paper) get bonus bounce from his killer timing.
It's a shame, albeit a predictable one, that Scharfman's answer to everything his premise asks is just a numbing splurge of digital carnage from the halfway mark. The foal's parents ride in, unforgivingly, and everyone runs around being ripped to shreds, like the cast of Clue if they'd fallen down a weird wormhole.
This may still sound crassly entertaining, but the execution is ugly, the laughs dry up, and the script's glimmers of intelligence are extinguished by screaming. Knowing how to end one of these films seems to defeat just about everybody, which is ample reason in itself to call time on the subgenre.
15 cert, 107 min. In cinemas from Friday April 4
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