Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega in a scene from Death of a Unicorn.Balazs Goldi/The Associated Press
- Death of a Unicorn
- Written and directed by Alex Scharfman
- Starring Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega and Will Poulter
- Classification 14A; 107 minutes
- Opens in theatres March 28
A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.
The film’s cracks reveal themselves right off the top, when writer-director Alex Scharfman fails to nail a tone by the half-hour mark and then, realizing his tactical error, decides to uneasily pivot to gross-out horror-comedy. But no amount of stylistic swerve will save a movie so self-satisfied with its own title and conceit that it forgets to add anything else of substance.
Essentially Jurassic Park by way of Succession but a whole lot less fun than that elevator pitch sounds, the movie opens with snivelling lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter Riley (Jenna Ortega) travelling to the remote British Columbia compound of the pharmaceutical tycoon Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). With Leopold on his deathbed, Elliot has been summoned to sort out his boss’s business affairs alongside Odell’s distraught wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and cocky fail-son Shepard (Will Poulter). Elliot is hoping to curry Odell’s favour and secure a board seat on his company, but during the drive over, he accidentally hits what appears to be a, well, unicorn – one whose golden horn seems to be endowed with supernatural healing properties. And so the struggle begins between nature and commerce, myth and money.
Wasting a perfectly game cast and a promising premise, Scharfman’s feature directorial debut simply doesn’t know what it wants to do or say, resulting in several narrative and thematic threads that go nowhere. What do unicorns have to do with the Northern Lights? Why is Odell funding a nature reserve if he has such naked contempt for the natural world? Is the “Canada” of it all – including a last-minute appearance by inept RCMP officers – supposed to be a joke that goes somewhere, or merely included for the hell of it? It is all a big case of “why bother?”
Even when the film shifts into haunted-house territory, with the unicorn’s enraged momma and poppa staging a bloody siege on Odell’s property, the gore seems thrown in as a last-ditch effort to shock its audience awake. And as if to further underline its lack of sharp teeth, the film closes on such a goopy note of sentimentality that it undermines any prior illusions of satirical bite.
Death of a Unicorn doesn’t offer so much a cure for what ails you as it does a list of symptoms of indie-quirk cinema. Manage your dosage accordingly.
