A father and daughter accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while en route to a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss seeks to exploit the creature’s miraculous curative properties.
If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll know Y2K last year massively upset me; I’m not used to A24 films sucking. But you know what? With a studio that big with so many creative juices flowing in quantity and quality, you can’t win ‘em all. So I kept that lodged in the back of my head when I went to see “Death of a Unicorn”.
Think The Lost World: Jurassic Park but only more unabashedly nonsensical…..and still not that remarkable.
For better or worse, Alex Scharfman’s debut has a very Yorgos Lanthimo’s vibe to how he guides each scene but his direction is more or less one giant homage. Then again, imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery and he dives headfirst into that mindset like a mad scientist getting his first big break, unapologetically wearing his influences on his sleeve. He’s obviously less interested in subverting genre expectations and more so in reveling in the absurdity of it all.
Yet again, the production design utilizes just one set location, and from the outset, it successfully achieves a balance between being sufficiently roomy while still feeling somewhat sparse. The staging is well-defined and restricted, but not to the point of feeling cramped, and yet the setting doesn't provide many options for variety. With a limited scope and scale, a reliance on recurrent, predictable set pieces is understandable but that’s all it has going for it, unable to properly imbue a sense of otherworldly mystery that perfectly complements the narrative at hand despite its grand hollowness deliberately mirroring excess and detachment. Larry Fong’s cinematography barely adds to the proceedings, defaulting to a wear-it-on-your-sleeve approach with a vibrant color palette, rather sturdy camera angles and seamless CGI integration (sometimes to the detriment of the film’s clarity). Sharply shot, it takes no other risks beyond looking crisp and outside a few time-lapse montages, the editing doesn’t stand out a whole lot either.
Maybe you can argue that the pacing was intended to be frenetic and erratic but rhythm plays a crucial role in maintaining the momentum and speed of a project and unfortunately, there’s rarely a steady beat or cohesive flow here to guide the audience through this. Tone falls into that same category of being spastic and irregular to a fault (more in detail later), the chunky CGI is surprisingly baffling in how incomplete it looks, costumes aren’t the most remarkable ones to look at here, it lives up to its R-rating wonderfully and as per usual with A24 films, the musical score possesses an ethereal and otherworldly rhythm, yet Grosuè Greco and Dan Romer manage to make it fit seamlessly in this context.
The kills do offer short bursts of excitement when we get there though.
Perhaps this films biggest head-scratching blunder is how it handles its cast members. Let’s not get it twisted: everyone is firmly aware of what type of movie they’re in and they play up their strongest traits to sell the absurdity they’re dealt with. But they do feel strained in regards to their characters because of how two-dimensional everyone is. Thinly written and with underbaked emotional climaxes that are easy to tune out, this gives the cast very little to and it narrowly avoids wasting the talents of those involved, especially Paul Rudd and Jenna freakin’ Ortega.
If anything, Will Poulter and Richard E. Grant are the standouts here.
So if you really look at this plot closely, this creature-feature is destined for B-movie offbeat splotchy cartoonish drama. To give credit where credit is due, the narrative narrowly avoids falling into the pitfalls that entrapped Cocaine Bear; at least the high concept and cheesy Syfy premise tries to offer more than just banking on its absurdity alone. Then again, as almost desperate as it seems to project quirkiness, it’s exactly that lack of pretension that makes the story destined for such a throwback vibe, reveling in its messy ambition to mimic the wild, slapdash energy of a late-night monster flick you’d see on cable TV. All of this is mostly staged through a comedic lens and there’s some ingenious conceit and creativity to come out of it.
It is also yet another eat-the-rich dissection where like Mickey 17, it’s very blatant in its class commentary about the cluelessness of the wealthy, the murky practices of pharmaceutical companies who prioritize profits over integrity and ethics, rather obvious warning signs about why animal cruelty is a bad idea, the obvious cautionary parenting tale for those who can’t balance responsibilities and the slight but faulty allegory about man’s mistreatment of nature. Harkening back to the mythology of unicorns in a bid to somehow legitimize the narrative’s daftness, it uses that to ask even more vague questions about the loss of innocence, purity and the allure of immortality, all fun concepts that fit within the mold of this satirical setup and despite running it through a mainstream filter, the end result does become slightly less predictable in spades.
Still, putting all that to one side, the plot is very straightforward and everything I just highlighted probably would’ve been better executed in a half-hour short film. The litany of ideas are dull at best or haphazardly presented at worst and more often than not, it’s the latter because the entire movie is a tonal jambalaya of dysfunctional black comedy and vain attempts at horror that quickly outpaces itself. It goes halfway in its eat-the-rich satire and wacky B-movie exploits and half-asses its execution on both of them thanks to the lack of focus and vital clarity, and the story only superficially explores its themes, never fully fleshing them out to leave a lasting impression. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s really repetitive as tension rises and falls and rises again without any real stakes or consequences for the characters, making it difficult to care about their fates.
And if you really think about it, brush all its subliminal messaging to the side and you realize the film is actively killing time until the slaughter starts, and the actual unicorn-menace sequences, after a while, are nothing special; roll all of this into one and you get a frustratingly passive experience, one that constantly gestures towards fun and creativity but squeamishly sways away for one reason or another.
Movies like this are the very reason high-concept ideas are a double-edged sword: it was so easy to sell this movie on its literal title but they can’t get enough mileage out of it to where filler and dead air has to encompass the rest of the runtime and it BARELY feels like a complete narrative with a proper beginning, middle and end.
A cerebral grounding with enough substance in its silliness but hardly much spectacle or identity that it isn’t three-dimensional enough to do justice to, “Death of a Unicorn” feels like a further evolution of A24’s troubling trend of spreading itself thin shifting from quality to quantity. Despite my ongoing support and admiration for the studio, this remains a significant concern.
