Death of a Unicorn Mildly Surprised Me

A unicorn isn't the only thing that dies in A24's Death of a Unicorn. Elliot Kinter and his daughter, Riley, are still mourning the passing of a wife and mother. Out of some stirring sense of sympathy, Odell Leopold, Elliot's eccentric and terminally ill boss, has invited him and Riley to spend some time at his mountain estate, a touching-enough gesture. But if you've ever driven through the mountains yourself, you may have had the misfortune of hitting a deer, though I imagine the deer didn't pity your bad luck all that much. But that's the real world. In movie land, you roadkill unicorns. The trouble is that unicorns are heavy. And when Elliot and Riley's battered SUV pulls up to the mansion, Odell inevitably has questions. As it turns out, unicorn horns contain near-supernatural healing properties, and where there's money to be made, wildlife ethics be spurned. Odell wants those healing properties, and I don't blame him, his being cancerous and all. What I do blame him for is being a selfish piece of trash. But getting his hands on these elements will be harder than he anticipated. In this world, unicorns don't prance around and walk up to you so you can pet them. They prowl in the dark, less of a legend and more of a nightmare. If you've ever wanted to see a pair of bloodthirsty unicorns tear a person in two, then Death of a Unicorn just might be the movie for you.

This movie manages to be a lot of things at once, some good, others less than. But one of my favorite things about it is its self-aware grounding of the unicorn myth. Gone are the sparkles and rainbows, replaced by long and mundane mountain drives followed by impossible roadkillings of fantastic beasts, something I can imagine seeing on the news if and when some of these folk legends of mysterious beasts become fact one day. Death of a Unicorn is fantastical and eccentric in a way few other movies dare to be, in ways that almost made me say only you, A24 out loud. This movie is a frivolous one. It knows its premise is ridiculous, and never takes itself too seriously because of it. It's not even remotely afraid to be a little or even a lot unhinged, and it ends up being a blast to watch because of its borderline cinematic lunacy. Even if its inspirations are identifiable enough, it works more often than not because it cares more about being its own story than paying homage to elsewhere.

I was impressed by the air of mystery hovering over Death of a Unicorn. The creatures are treated with a respectful amount of interest and a surprising level of subversiveness. The unicorns in this movie are not nice, sparkly, and innocuous. They're never dull, either. The characters in this movie don't need to pretend to be interested in these animals - you will be, too. Nevertheless, this movie can lose its footing more often than I'd care for it to. To lodge a specific complaint, Death of a Unicorn moves too quickly. Within forty-five minutes, its screenplay has road-killed a unicorn, redesignated centuries of unicorn myths as historical fact, and cured cancer; you heard that last part right. Its runtime lands at just under two hours, and it would have benefited greatly from being longer than it actually ended up being. Riley really gets sucked into the study of unicorn myths in this movie, and some more in-depth exploration of this story's mythical side would have been a quick fix.

Death of a Unicorn also struggles from a cast that's too large to matter enough once they start to die. I saw a lot of people perish at the hands (horns?) of unicorns, and at times, I was even rooting for the beasts to wipe the whole lot of these cardboard cutouts off the map. The acting is bland, the characters little more than shallow go-getters worshiping the bigger story in vain. If this movie's strength is its imagination, its weaknesses lie in execution, most notably in a series of third-act exposition dumps revealing truths we should have known long before this dangerous game of unicorn hide-and-seek began. Still, I won't brush the cast chemistry under the rug. Even if the characters in this movie may be shallow, they're often a blast to watch when their wildly differing personalities bounce off each other. But I imagine you're here to watch unicorns murder people, not family-and-friend drama. And in the realm of blood and guts, Death of a Unicorn delivers. It's not lost on me that the filmmakers were probably holed up in the editing room with grins on their faces, giggling with delinquent delight as their digital horse did its dirty deeds.

Death of a Unicorn is one of the oddest movies I've seen this year, not because of one particularly original trait, but rather because of its willingness to fuse classic action tropes with an eccentric dash of fantasy and horror, genres you've never seen mixed like this before. The movie may not be able to entirely outrun some choppy pacing or a climax that feels like and then they lived happily ever after in all the wrong ways, but I want to laud it for its willingness to be eccentric in a truly self-aware way. Granted, its ambition exceeds the length of its screenplay, and this movie is at least a half hour too long for the story it's trying to tell - a generous estimate on my part. It can also be shallow at points, as if it's relying on its bombastic premise of killer unicorns to carry it to the finish line. Still, it's good to see original cinema this, er, original, even if it takes a murderous unicorn hunting assault-rifle-wielding mercenaries in a forest to claim that title, these days.

Death of a Unicorn - 6/10

Job 39:19-25