A lot of Americans want to stick it to Big Pharma. Or, really, to the rich in general. “Eat the rich” movies and memes are saturating our media streams, from Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) to tweets turning alleged health-care CEO–shooter Luigi Mangione into a “baby girl”-type folk hero. It’s an enticing premise that Hollywood and many contemporary filmmakers intend to capitalize on—and the irony is not lost on anyone.
Inaccessible health care, rising medicine costs, and the concentration of wealth in the upper class: Rejection of the pharmaceutical and health-care industry is reaching a fever pitch. That’s why when Alex Scharfman’s debut film, Death of a Unicorn, was at South by Southwest in Austin, I expected this genuinely striking premise to give people an outlet for these frustrations. Instead, we’re spoon-fed a toothless commentary on wealth and greed that dilutes the issue at hand in another blockbuster-adjacent movie that chooses thrills over content.
Death of a Unicorn, as one might expect from the flashy title, is pretty straightforward. An indolent Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) travels with his dejected Gen-Z daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), to a weekend retreat in the remote wilderness. It’s not really a family bonding moment, but rather, Elliot intends to meet with his ailing pharmaceutical-titan boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), to become his proxy if, and only if, he fits the Leopold family’s values. That’s why Ridley is there—but the father–daughter relationship is rocky, to put it lightly, after the death of Ridley’s mother.
We don’t have to wait long until the unicorn appears in Elliot’s peripheral vision while he texts and drives. One second to the next, the unicorn is almost roadkill. The blood of the mythical creature splatters onto the father–daughter duo when Elliot mercy-kills it with a tire iron, inadvertently curing Ridley’s facial acne and Elliot’s poor eyesight. Then, they pack it up and head to the Leopolds in shock.
Turns out, the healing properties work both ways—and the unicorn wakes up in a frenzy outside, only to be murdered again, point-blank, by the Leopolds’ gun-toting assistant, Shaw (Jessica Hynes). The Leopolds—including spoiled son Shepard (Will Poulter) and power-boss mom Belinda (Téa Leoni)—discover the magical powers and believe they’ve hit the jackpot. Strong-arming Elliot into participating rather than listening to the pleas of his daughter, they don’t waste a breath before scientists show up to test the powers on Odell, who perks up in a matter of hours. It’s going to make a fortune, and Elliot believes this is the only way to make sure he and his daughter are financially secure for life.
This is about where Death of a Unicorn plateaus. Put plainly, the problem arises from the need to make everything digestible. The story is safe, only using blunted barbs to tell its eat-the-rich story. The evil Odells are shallow caricatures, which means the resulting commentary is just as skin-deep. The money-hungry moguls use cyclical logic to justify the monetization of medicine, but the stakes are never as high as they should feel. Meanwhile, Ridley offers a haphazard voice meant to amplify the dissatisfaction Americans feel against the rich, yet the film mostly ignores the one thing that could make us relate to her anger—that she blames the system for her mother’s death.
Instead, Death of a Unicorn resorts to cheap tricks to entice the disquieted public. The young unicorn becomes the catalyst for a predictable gore-fest when its two giant parents descend from the mountain. These beasts fulfill Ridley’s art history–fueled prophecy that unicorns are, in fact, vengeful and rather demonic. Everyone that seems even tangentially wicked is dispatched with increasing, though ultimately hollow, brutality of the infernal unicorn parents.
What is this gore-fest for? My only guess is to leverage shock to make viewers understand that people are bad. Maybe that’s true. And perhaps that’s why Elliot is arguably the most compelling character; his painful complacency is one of the film’s most frustrating elements. The entire film is tethered to Elliot’s willingness to concede to the wishes of the Leopolds under some guise that this path will allow him, at least the chance, to get his slice of the pie. His self-preservation implies the damning of millions of people, and it’s something so many people are complicit in across the U.S.
Death of a Unicorn is part of a string of painfully literal filmmaking. A hollow spectacle masquerading as novel social commentary, it leaves us with almost nothing to think about. It may be fun to some, but it’s missing the incisiveness these commentary films seem more and more unwilling to produce, or perhaps we, as the perpetually scrolling audience, seem unwilling to demand. We don’t deserve anything nice because we’re not asking for it. R, 107 min.
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