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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
12 hours ago
- France 24
Chinese mega-hit 'Ne Zha II' enlists Michelle Yeoh to woo US audiences
A24, the trendy indie studio behind "Everything Everywhere All At Once," is releasing a redubbed English-language version in US theaters this Friday, featuring a voice cast including Michelle Yeoh. The hope is that a fantastical tale of warring dragons, demons and immortals -- rooted in Chinese mythology, but reimagined with flashy battle scenes worthy of a Marvel movie -- can translate to Western audiences. Speaking on the red carpet of a Los Angeles premiere this month, Yeoh described the movie as a "cultural exchange." "I had seen 'Ne Zha II' in Chinese, and even at that time I thought, 'I hope they do an English version, because you want little kids to be able to see it and understand,'" she told People magazine. The sprawling fantasy film centers on Ne Zha, a tiny child with fearsome magical powers, who sets off on a quest to save his best friend after his hometown is attacked by dragons. The movie is already an astonishing box office success. "Ne Zha 2" has grossed around $2.2 billion worldwide -- a source of great patriotic pride in China, even if the vast majority of those receipts came from domestic audiences. For context, since the Covid-19 pandemic, only one other film has passed $2 billion worldwide: "Avatar: The Way of Water." "This is probably the most talked-about non-US film of the year," said Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "$2.2 billion puts it in the pantheon." Chinese audiences have also pointed to the movie's special effects as evidence of the country's film industry catching up with, or even surpassing, Hollywood's offerings. Some 4,000 Chinese animators worked on the 3D fantasy epic. 'Globalization of content' Still, the movie's initial, subtitled launch overseas failed to set box offices alight. It took $20 million in the US, and generated similarly solid but not spectacular figures in other markets like the United Kingdom and Australia. The movie is based on the 16th-century Chinese novel "Investiture of the Gods" which itself draws heavily on millennia-old folklore and characters. It features an at-times bewildering array of shape-shifting heroes and villains who will be unfamiliar to viewers with no knowledge of traditional Chinese stories or the film's 2019 predecessor, "Ne Zha." That said, A24 is hoping that an international voice cast, delivering the film's irreverent humor in a style reminiscent of Hollywood superhero fare, can help bridge the cultural gap. It comes at a time when Western audiences are increasingly flocking to works rooted in Asian cultures, such as last weekend's US box office top 12 featuring two Indian films ("Coolie," "War 2") and one Japanese movie ("Shin Godzilla 4K.") And the shift has been even more pronounced on streaming platforms. Summer smash-hit "KPop Demon Hunters" is rapidly on course to become Netflix's most-watched original film ever, and the debut season of "Squid Game" remains its most-watched TV show of all time. "There's definitely been a globalization of content, in terms of people all around the world enjoying cinema from different countries," said Dergarabedian.
LeMonde
17-07-2025
- LeMonde
With 'Eddington,' Ari Aster has crafted a dark, cynical fable about an America on the verge of collapse
Le Monde's Verdict – Must See Just as American cinema seemed to have lost its critical edge, Ari Aster has dived straight into the heart of the divide threatening the fabric of the nation – the specter of secession again looming over the bald eagle, the symbol of the United States. As part of a new wave of horror filmmakers (Hereditary in 2018, followed by Midsommar in 2019), the gifted 39-year-old protégé of the independent studio A24 has, with his fourth feature, revived the kind of skepticism that characterized New Hollywood in the 1970s/ With Eddington, Aster has continued the rejection of genre conventions that he began with Beau Is Afraid (2023), now moving toward a psychiatric fable of deep darkness conceived at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through a satire that spares no one, he channels a sense of contemporary nihilism, where grotesque excesses and enormity now bite into the horrifying Trump-era circus. Eddington is a small town in New Mexico, introduced with a lingering shot of its municipal sign. In May 2020, public health measures deliver the final blow to a social contract and civil harmony already badly eroded. The main fault line runs between the sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) – a lackluster guardian of order, asthmatic and resistant to mask-wearing – and the mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a classic liberal adept at public relations and political networking. As the elections approach, the sheriff launches a campaign against the mayor and his plan to build a predatory data center – a clash between patriotic common sense and a disconnected political elite.
France 24
28-06-2025
- France 24
Fans celebrate 'Squid Game' finale with Seoul parade
The third and final season was released Friday, concluding the series that sees desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children's games for a massive cash prize. Director Hwang Dong-hyuk said he had "poured everything" into the series, which launched nearly four years ago. "So while it's sentimental to see it end," he said, "there's also a sense of relief". Fans gathered near Seoul's Gyeongbokgung Palace, led by marchers dressed in the bright pink uniforms worn by the show's mysterious masked agents. They were followed by others carrying oversize toys from one of the games featured in the series, along with the show's flag. Park Sang-gyu, a fan who stayed up all night watching the final season, said the dystopian drama was "ultimately a story about people". "As you watch, you realise it's not just about the games -- it reflects many aspects of real life." The walls of the Seoul Metropolitan Library were lit up with key scenes, including Young-hee -- the giant motion-sensing animatronic doll featured in one of its brutal games. Lee Byung-hun, who played the masked Front Man overseeing the competition, said the show had become "something of a cultural phenomenon". "One that has drawn one of the boldest lines in the history of Korean content," he said. The first two seasons of the series are among Netflix's most-watched shows, and in 2022, Hwang and the show's leading actor, Lee Jung-jae, became the first Asian men to win Emmy Awards. The final season follows its hero Gi-hun, played by Lee, as he returns to the ultra-violent games to dismantle them from within after surviving the first round. Along with filmmaker Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning 2019 thriller "Parasite" and K-pop sensation BTS, "Squid Game" is considered one of the most powerful examples of South Korea's rise as a global cultural force.
