Death of a Unicorn is a 2025 horror comedy film directed by Alex Scharfman, and the cast includes Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Pulter, Tea Leoni, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Carrigan, Jessica Hynes, Sunita Mani, Steve Park.
Imagine if Ready or Not crashed into Pan’s Labyrinth at 70mph, and a unicorn exploded.
That’s roughly the vibe of Death of a Unicorn, a deranged horror-comedy that skewers late-stage capitalism, parental guilt, and childhood wonder.
Paul Rudd leads the charge as Elliot, a slick corporate lawyer with a soul that's more gray area than grayscale, and while he’s not evil per se, he is the kind of man who views morality as a luxury item, and when he takes his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) on a weekend road trip to his boss’s countryside estate, it seems like your standard rich-people-being-creepy setup.
But things take a sharp, glittery turn when Elliot accidentally mows down a unicorn. Yes, a unicorn, and rather than spiraling into existential horror at the death of a mythical creature, Elliot does what any well-dressed, overpaid attorney would: he hides the body and keeps driving.
But at the mansion, things get weird fast.
This isn’t your childhood sticker book fantasy, and what follows is a surreal bloodbath as myth meets man and capitalism gets kicked in the teeth by creatures of legend.
The tone is a tightrope act, as director Alex Scharfman, navigates the absurd with the assured hand of someone who knows how to blend satire and savagery. The comedy is dark, and the pacing mostly tight, though a few dialogue heavy detours do drag a bit.
And the cast includes some big names, and I thought they delivered.
Rudd is excellent, balancing Elliot’s internal collapse with his signature charm, and he’s a man torn between fatherhood and finance, and Ortega, ever the rising scream queen, anchors the madness, offering a necessary human heartbeat beneath the blood and glitter.
And Richard E. Grant’s Odell is deliciously despicable, a villain so smooth you almost want him to succeed, until the unicorns come. Téa Leoni is underused as his frosty wife, while Will Poulter chews every bit of scenery as the son from hell, and Anthony Carrigan deserves a special mention as Griff, the eerily quiet manservant who might actually be part unicorn himself. It’s that kind of movie.
But not everything lands, as the CGI occasionally stumbles into early-2000s territory, with some unicorn effects wobbling between majestic and janky.
And the movie doesn’t bring a lot of fresh ideas to the table. as it's quite a surface level generic film that plays it very safe, but that’s fine, because it’s more focused on being wild and over-the-top than deep or serious, but the problem is, every now and then it tries to get emotional, and those moments don’t really fit with the goofy tone.
It feels stuck between being silly and being heartfelt, but when it just embraces the chaos and lets the guts fly, it actually becomes kind of fun, and even in its weakest moments, Death of a Unicorn knows exactly what it is, a biting, bloody fairy tale for the morally bankrupt age.
I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but you need to embrace the chaos a bit, and don't take it too seriously, because as said, it is a very safe film that could have done more with it all for sure, but I enjoyed it for what it was.
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