‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and a Very Bad Road Trip

There is always the possibility of hitting an animal while driving along a country road. What is far less likely—let’s agree, essentially impossible—is that the animal in question might be a unicorn. That is precisely what happens at the beginning of Death of a Unicorn, an odd hybrid of offbeat indie comedy and horror film that arrives on streaming via independent distributor A24 and producer Ari Aster. The influence of the Midsommar filmmaker can be felt in some of the story’s increasingly mythological elements, but at its core Alex Scharfman’s film works as a suspense tale grounded in a tense family dynamic.

Paul Rudd plays Elliot Kintner, a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company who is traveling to his boss’s country estate for an important meeting. He is accompanied by his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), who lives with him following the death of her mother. Ridley hates the trip, resents her father’s eagerness to please these unpleasant corporate figures, and makes no effort to hide it. She likes it even less when they hit an animal on the road—only to discover that the injured creature is a strange, mysterious unicorn.

When Ridley approaches the dying animal, she touches his horn and experiences something like a mystical vision, a moment of intense connection. The spell is abruptly broken when her father finishes off—or believes he finishes off—the suffering creature. From that moment on, their already fragile relationship begins to crack further. Things grow even more strained when they arrive at the estate with the wounded unicorn hidden in the car, especially as Elliot bends over backward to accommodate the unbearable family that owns the place: the terminally ill patriarch Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant); his performatively pleasant daughter Belinda (Téa Leoni); and his insufferable, eccentric nepo-baby son Shepard (Will Poulter). Ridley, by contrast, openly despises them all.

The pharmaceutical business plot quickly fades into the background once everyone realizes that the unicorn in the car is still alive—and that the creature may be hiding an extraordinary secret. Matters escalate further when the unicorn’s relatives arrive to retrieve their injured “foal” and make it abundantly clear who truly owns the land, and how little humans belong there. Along the way, unresolved family conflicts resurface, old debts come due, and survival becomes the main objective in a situation that increasingly resembles a horror-leaning Jurassic Park spin-off.

A strong ensemble cast—including Anthony Carrigan, Sunita Mani, and Stephen Park alongside the leads—adds a welcome layer of quality to a film that wants to be many things at once: a satire of ultra-wealthy elites and pharmaceutical corporations, a family drama about a fractured father-daughter relationship, and eventually a full-blown horror-thriller about a group of people trying to survive a kind of home invasion staged by… unicorns. Unfortunately, the film’s credibility suffers from digital effects that never fully convince, particularly in the creatures’ awkward, unnatural movement through space. Without a sense that these beings could feel even remotely real, Death of a Unicorn loses its footing, and the rest of the film struggles to stand on its own.

Entertaining but ultimately unable to become the cult classic its creators may have envisioned, Death of a Unicorn presents itself as a curiosity only to gradually reveal itself as a fairly conventional monster movie. The social satire is blunt and simplistic, and while it is initially fun to watch mythological creatures brutalize billionaires who profit from human health, the joke wears thin quickly. Will Poulter, in fact, emerges as the film’s standout. Every one of his appearances feels like a burst of energy, a reminder that beneath the mechanical workings of the plot there is a small group of actors clearly enjoying themselves—and having fun exploring the strange, occasionally amusing possibilities of what you can do with a unicorn.