As income inequality in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world approaches an inevitable inflection point, “Eat the Rich” stories have become, if nothing else, more prevalent, reflecting changing cultural attitudes about the wealthy elites who seem to control everything, from politics to media and in the case of writer-director Alex Scharfman’s middling horror-satire, Death of a Unicorn, a profit-first, people-last pharmaceutical company headed by a dying CEO and his casually cruel, ruthlessly venal family.
Death of a Unicorn, however, centres not on the aforementioned obscenely wealthy family, the Leopolds, but on Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley Kintner (Jenna Ortega). A senior executive with the pharmaceutical company, Elliot hopes to acquire the signature of the dying Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) on proxy forms that will make him the most powerful non-Leopold in the company. This plan ensures the safety and security for Ridley he promised his late wife.
While Ridley, an art history major, occupies a position of privilege — her left-wing, progressive college-informed views are funded by her father’s salary — Elliot sees himself, however incorrectly, as somehow doing the “right thing.” Their differing worldviews, the ethically guided idealist versus the morally ambiguous realist, put them in constant tension. However, Scharfman juggles far too many ideas, which leaves that tension at surface-level, mentioned repeatedly, but rarely explored beyond whatever conflict it contributes to the story.
Everything changes, of course, when the titular unicorn attempts to cross a forest road, collides with their car, and is put out of its misery by Elliot with one or two blows from a blunt object. Late for a meeting with the Leopolds at their country house surrounded by a wildlife preserve, Elliot makes the fateful, if slightly illogical decision, to take the unicorn’s corpse with them.
Before Elliot can get Odell to sign on the proxy papers, he’s forced to meet-and-greet the other members of the Leopold family, Belinda (Téa Leoni), Odell’s philanthropist wife, and Shepard (Will Poulter), their smug, self-entitled twenty-something son. The household staff includes Griff (a scene-stealing Anthony Carrigan), the family’s put-upon factotum, and Shaw (Jessica Hynes), their monosyllabic chief of security.
In short order, Shaw’s very special set of skills needs to be employed. The unicorn isn’t dead after all, and once the Leopolds discover the unicorn’s miraculous healing powers, company scientists and researchers descend on the estate, hoping to exploit every inch of the unicorn for its medicinal properties. The unicorn, however, isn’t one-of-one. Its parents detect its presence at the estate and they’re none too happy with the Leopolds or what they intend to do with the unicorn’s offspring.
Already on the narrative back-burner, the Elliot-Ridley relationship becomes of secondary importance, leaving Death of a Unicorn to take a predictable turn into outright horror. Far from cuddly or plush, the unicorns terrorize the Leopolds and their staff, hunting and goring them practically at will. While predictably gory and occasionally gruesome, Scharfman and his producers inexplicably rely on CGI over animatronics for several Jurassic Park-inspired sequences that not only look under-rendered and rushed, but also far from the fear-inducing or even darkly comic results for which the effects are obviously intended.
Scharfman also does little to develop Elliot’s “will he or won’t he redeem himself and choose his daughter over wealth and power?” arc, leaving his inevitable confrontation with the unicorn powers-that-be emotionally and thus, dramatically, unsatisfying. Instead, Death of a Unicorn depends on the caricatured, heightened performances by the cast, especially Leoni’s self-absorbed pseudo-philanthropist, Poulter’s perpetual screw-up, and a more grounded Ortega as the film’s heart-and-soul to get the film past its frequent rough spots.
It’s to their credit that Scharfman’s film almost succeeds, but Scharfman’s inability to hit more than the obvious targets of his satire, underdeveloped ideas, and themes, plus a sloppy, haphazard approach to key set pieces places Death of a Unicorn in “also-ran” territory.
