I’ll clearly mark when I start giving spoilers, because I encourage all to watch this if they feel they’ll enjoy it. I’m nothing if not an advocate for A24’s horror comedy about pharmaceutical companies and vengeful unicorns! AKA, the perfect movie for me.

Death of a Unicorn(2025) stars Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Jessica Hynes, Anthony Carrigan, Sunita Mani, and Steve Park. It was written and directed by Alex Scharfman.

The Synopsis
IMDb says: “Father-Daughter duo Elliott and Ridley hit a unicorn with their car and bring it to the wilderness retreat of a mega-wealthy pharmaceutical CEO.”

Background
I love A24. This is a great cast. And the concept is awesome too. It’s a really solid debut movie for a first time writer/director.

In watching interviews I learned Scharfman wrote a script years ago that nobody wanted to make and Paul Rudd read it and loved it, so this was written with Paul in mind. This was also one of the only movies filmed during the writers/actors strike because A24 was separate from the massive studio conglomerate (AKA the assholes) and agreed to the union requests immediately.

I thought when I initially heard the premise that this would be a feature length philosophical debate about what the unicorn blood could be used for and whether it should be used at all. Because they quickly learn the unicorn blood can heal all ailments, even cancer. And it is that, for half the movie. But then, if you’ve seen the trailers, it becomes a Jurassic Park style monster movie, where several other unicorns show up to avenge their child and all hell breaks loose.

I don’t mind that it took such a turn, it did feel warranted. This will be and is already a divisive movie. It’s weird and a big swing but not a big enough swing for people who want weird. It doesn’t have the inexplicable mainstream appeal that Everything Everywhere had, but I imagine this may do well on streaming. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the home run I hoped it would be (A sports metaphor from me, the sports guy) but it was close, and I definitely want to rewatch it.

John Interprets Patterns
I’m no film historian, but I can interpret patterns and I am currently watching The Studio, a great show that almost explicitly says “Hollywood is always behind the curve because studios are desperate to find the next big thing by copying the last big thing, usually with diminishing returns”. Whether that’s said in the show or I lifted that from the Vulture article about it, I can’t remember.

But it is obvious, it’s why superheroes permeate our culture and why we’re going to get ninety product based movies because of Barbie. And the end of a decade especially influences this trend. Because movies coming out at the end of a decade sum up the feelings and aesthetic trends of the last decade while looking forward.

On lists of best years for movies you’ll often see 1999, 2009, and 2019 come up. 1999 was the year of The Matrix, a groundbreaking film about reality and perception that garnered several knock-offs with different takes on leather clad action and simulation theory. 2009 was the year of Avatar, a movie I hate but was irregardless somewhat influential, mostly from an effects standpoint because the story is basic as fuck. It was also the year of Watchmen and The Hangover, whose directors would go on to both make terrible DC movies in different ways.

But 2019 is the most relevant, because 2019 was the year of Parasite, Knives Out, Ready Or Not, Midsommar, and Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. These movies all influenced this movie in some way, even Joker, I guess, and have influenced the several movies we’ve gotten recently that all play on some variation of stupid rich people/resort or house in the middle of nowhere/someone not rich up against it all/insane massacre/feelings of unease.

The DNA of that exists in all these films, and inevitably exists within Glass Onion, The Menu, Companion, Blink Twice, Triangle of Sadness, and Saltburn. It’s the basic structure for every season of The White Lotus. This is very “eat the rich” coded. Mileage will vary on whether you want to see Hollywood lampoon horrible rich people. My mileage is that it often allows great actors to chew scenery.

Spoilers start here!

The Rudd of it all
This is a very welcome shift in his career. I’m fine with Hollywood Rudd, but most of the new releases I’ve covered while doing this blog have been subpar, and I’m so glad to see him go back to taking weird swings so I can stop talking about bland Ghostbusters sequels and a subpar Ant-Man movie. This will go down in history as the year Paul Rudd entered the horror comedy genre and made a weird thriller comedy with Tim Robinson. I would say he’s going back to his roots but he isn’t, this is something completely different, and I’m here for it.

He is, by the way, good in this. It’s difficult to fall in love with his character because he sucks. Everyone in this kind of does to some degree, except for Anthony Carrigan’s character, who is the king of this movie. Paul and Jenna are the straight men in all of this. Jenna’s character has to ground everything while surrounded by this vacuum where morality and reason should exist but doesn’t. Paul is a yes man. He’s a bad dad and a widower. He’s been a bad dad since his wife died. This is a different shade for him, but he’s too 3-dimensional to lean into the meat of either side of the character beyond the cowardice and desperation to please.

Oh Right The Plot
So yeah Paul Rudd is a lawyer for a shitty rich family and he’s brought in to finalize Richard E. Grant’s contracts and stuff before he dies from extreme incurable cancer. He might be made partner but only if Grant and his family think him and his daughter are close, because they’re all about family values. They claim. Later Will Poulter’s character tells him outright they only wanted to butter him up so they could pin all their crimes on him later on.

After the family learns about the unicorn, they tell Paul not to call any animal protection organizations or government agencies because they want to “protect him from the consequences of his actions”. Jenna Ortega is estranged from her dad, and she’s been on their bullshit since they got there. Her insistence that they get help or leave is ignored and her dad acts like a douche. Soon several scientists and a security detail arrive to test Paul and Jenna, because the unicorn blood splashed on them and cured them of their far sightedness, congestion, and asthma respectively.

It’s not long before the unicorn blood is injected directly into Richard E. Grant, and the cancer goes into full remission. The rich family wants to sell the unicorn to other very sick rich people. They can’t replicate what they have, so it must remain exclusive. But before they can leave with the unicorn, the retreat is attacked by other unicorns.

Jenna Ortega warned them of this too, as she removed herself from the rich madness to study old tapestries of how unicorns used to be, with graphic illustrations detailing exactly how the story was about to play out. Inevitably this all falls on death ears and one by one, the scientists, Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, and Will Poulter die at the horns, teeth and hooves of the unicorns. Téa Leoni gets her guts ripped out and eaten by one. It’s fantastic.

At the end Paul Rudd redeems himself by stabbing Shep, Will Poulter’s character, with the sawed-off unicorn horn. But Shep stabs him with an arrow. And then gets kicked to death. And because Paul chose to protect the unicorns and choose his daughter over money and his job for once in his life, the unicorns bring him back to life. This is the part I take issue with. But hold on a second, there’s more.

The cops show up and find no unicorns, a bunch of corpses, and a bloody father and daughter. So they get arrested and on the drive to the station, the unicorns gallop by and give Paul a look that says “Hey we had a connection when we bumped horns and made that purple resurrection cloud for you, so you know we’re going to flip this cop car.” And they buckle up and the unicorns run in front of the car as the film cuts to black mid-crash.

The Verdict…?
I think Scharfman wrote himself into a corner. He couldn’t let Paul go full Role Models/Anchorman style cartoonish asshole because it would be too depressing if the movie ended with Jenna Ortega being vindicated by the death of her dad and riding off with unicorns. He needed to be redeemable, and I suppose he was, but that’s not as interesting…? It’s just that riding that vague line of not too dickish/not too nice hurts Paul’s performance a bit. They say they wanted to weaponize his likability. I’m not sure they succeeded.

While Jenna Ortega, essentially the main character, is left to play mostly the same beats of her character in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. None of this is egregious and none of it ruins the movie and I can’t tell you specifically how he could have fixed it, but something is off with the father/daughter dynamic, as good as their performances are.

Additionally, the dead mom thing is mostly unnecessary. She easily could have abandoned them or just been off screen telling Paul to be a better dad and connect with his daughter more. Grief is a poignant theme but not one this movie really has any time to explore.

For the movie to land harder and be more memorable it needs something different. It’s impossible to say what that should be. Maybe it just shouldn’t exist. But I would be bummed if it didn’t.

So I’m of two minds. On the one hand, it was a great time had by all and the all was me. The dialogue was really good, the acting was terrific. I want to see Téa Leoni play a million more characters like this. Richard E. Grant has never not brought me joy. But there are some undercooked elements. The background of the unicorns is not really developed. The tapestries and historical evidence are interesting, but no explanation as to their grand connection with the universe, which is fine, but it leaves them feeling ancillary to the plot. Also I don’t know if more explanation would’ve made me enjoy this more. I can’t win.

Still, I really like this. And I’ve been rambling for a while because there’s a lot to say. I haven’t even really gotten into the other characters, who are all great. Will Poulter is a jackass who runs around saying ridiculously ignorant things while wearing weirdly short shorts. He also snorts powdered unicorn horn, which is really funny. Richard E. Grant calls people “amigo” and “little sister” and eats bloody unicorn steaks.

At the end of the day, I may be in the minority on liking this, it may do poorly and disappear, but can we just appreciate for a moment that an independent studio allowed a first-time filmmaker to make a weird monster movie about killer unicorns with a bunch of good actors? That’s what matters to me. This was a long one because there’s a lot to say but we’re almost done. Got another segment first.

Some Stuff John Wrote Down During The Movie

• The horn makes you universe high
• The sharp zip of Paul’s trapper keeper thing is so good
• Paul Rudd: “We hit it with the car. And then I blunt force trauma’d it out of sympathy.”
• Also Paul Rudd: “You had an experience and I will pay for the extra therapy, but I don’t see what we stand to gain by making this whole weekend about you and your relationship with a dead magical horse”
• These snap peas are delicious (I snuck a bag of snap peas into the theater
• Paul Rudd killed a unicorn and is now being studied by scientists but he wants to know if there’s an omelette station at breakfast; my king
• I’m hungry
• Snap peas are not that filling
• LEAVE THE HORN YOU DUMB BITCH YOU BOUT TO DIE
• Telling your dead wife you would do anything to protect your daughter doesn’t mean steal and sell a unicorn horn Paul
• My main complaint is when things get crazy the dialogue is imperceptible, the camera can’t follow the action, and the kills get kind of muddled and Téa Leoni is dead now aw man
• Will Poulter is gonna threaten to kill Jenna Ortega because he thinks getting a unicorn to mate with a fair maiden will fix everything? That high motherfucker
• I’m glad Anthony Carrigan lived, can’t wait to see him play Metamorpho
• That’s so funny they have literally no way to prove the unicorn thing so Paul and Jenna got arrested because it looked like they just killed a whole house full of people
• I know he is a lawyer but I don’t think that’ll save them
• The unicorns are all pure white now, was the fur black because one of them died or because they had to kill people or was it the northern lights and the fact that things weren’t right with the universe???
• Oh so the unicorns are going to crash the cop car and rescue Paul and Jenna, which makes no sense to me, how do the unicorns know about police?
• When Paul Rudd got brought back to life by them and saw the universe and their celestial purpose did they also see his knowledge of laws and stuff?
• And if so surely the unicorns would understand that’ll just get them in deeper shit with the law and a cop will die?
• Or maybe they also absorbed Jenna Ortega’s art studies degree and realized that thematically the movie started with a car crashing into a unicorn so it should end with a unicorn crashing into a car
• Well that was fun
• Additional post-viewing shoutout to the great Jessica Hynes, Steve Park, and Sunita Mani who all felt like real people just going along with the crazy
• Like the crazy of casting Jessica Hynes as a mostly silent gun-toting bodyguard

Overall Rating: 8.1/10(It wasn’t perfect, but boy I had a good time with it.)
Rudd Rating: 8.8/10(Same thing. It’s a new Rudd era. I like it!)

Next time… a Rudd-adjacent property, sooner than you’d think.