Death of a Unicorn (2025), a review

Only a fair maiden can read this article.

A review should probably start off being coy, but I want to emphasise that this is an out and out failure of a film on all levels. The script is terrible, the cinematography is bland and cheap, the effects are childish, and the performances are almost uniformly underwhelming. It’s not particularly long, but even the pacing is glacial.

This is a bad movie.

‘Death of a Unicorn’ (2025) is the latest mid-tier prestige release from A24, in the same vein as their other recent flops ‘Y2K’ (2024) and ‘Maxxxine’ (2024). The distribution company loves throwing a youth-oriented horror film onto their slate, and this is that for 2025. The fact it’s bad doesn’t matter, because it’s sold on premise and cast, not quality.

To summarise the plot, Jenna Ortega and her father Paul Rudd (character names irrelevant) are heading up the mountain for his job interview, which he is up for due to his workhouse mentality since the death of his wife. But on the way up, they ram into a unicorn, which Rudd beats to death, interrupting Ortega’s “trippy” vision of generic space imagery. They both get oily blood on them, which heals their ailments, and causes the rich people to covet the unicorn. It’s a baby unicorn, so people die at the horns and teeth of the parents, and the film ends with more murder by the unicorns on behalf of Rudd and Ortega. Credits.

It’s yet another rich-people-bad film, in line with other such hits as ‘The Menu’ (2022) and ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2022). Like those films, the class commentary is shallow and lazy. It understands that the “wealthy elites” suck, but can only really interact with that through broad stereotypes. The maniacal patriarch, the preening daughter, the cokehead son. Roles written with all the flair of an SNL sketch.

The poors are no better - Paul Rudd in particular is hampered by a bad script that requires him to play the greedy sycophant, which he really cannot commit to. The film expects the relationship between he and Ortega to carry the viewers to the end emotionally. Unfortunately, despite some of Ortega’s best crying work, it does not connect at all.

Ortega is specifically hampered by the dialogue and direction, which lean into her ability to be awkward and rude, then flip into a crying mess. It all reads very…Kristen Stewart in Twilight. There’s no foundation to her character, so her half-hearted attempts to drag emotion from the tenser moments fall flat. It feels like the dynamic is predicated on her inability to leave, but this is an adult in university. She knows how to drive a care.

Her dialogue in particular reads like a first draft, and the performance is amateurish as a result. Which is unfortunate, as Ortega is genuinely too talented to be this bad on screen. Being typecast as the awkward teenager is bad enough, but when this the material she’s given to work with, I question everyone from the agents to her own judgement.

But if she’s bad, then everyone else is abysmal. Richard E. Grant plays his billionaire villain like a Jumanji character, Téa Leoni struggles to inject humour into her tired lines, and Will Poulter gives a performance that somehow is too much and not enough at the same time. Sunita Mani gets maybe the only two funny lines in the script.

I should also acknowledge Anthony Carrigan, Steve Park, and Jessica Hynes, who are all in the film too.

‘Death of a Unicorn’ is also shot in the least interesting way possible. Surrounded by the beauty of Hungary, is a gorgeous house in the mountains, this is a no-brainer. Outside of the first and last scenes of the film, you could have fooled me into believing this was all done on a soundstage behind a theme part. I can excuse the bad effects as a result of budget, but the bland framing is entirely a creative problem.

This film should be better. The actors have been competent to brilliant in other roles. Hungary is a beautiful country just begging to be shot with integrity and interest. The premise of killer unicorns is unique. What went wrong?

You have to blame Alex Scharfman, who is the creative visionary behind the film. Having apparently written this film with Rudd in mind, Scharfman is a producer first, and you can tell. He’s been pitching his own products for years now apparently, and this does feel like the cheap, weird project thrown to somebody as a reward for good service.

It’s hard to begrudge somebody for playing the game and getting something like this made. In other eras of cinema, this kind of stupid B-Movie would have been treated as a novelty for the kids and quietly allowed to bomb. Which is what exactly has happened. But there aren’t that many of these films getting pushed to cinemas, and I find it shocking that this got a theatrical release.

The worst part is, the film teases a much more interesting and stupid premise. At one point, Ortega sees through the eyes of the unicorns, and immediately I had hope that the twist of the film was that they were all going to turn into unicorns. That the sudden health turns were a precursor to hooves and vampire teeth (which the unicorns have) and fur. Instead, the twist is that the unicorns do bad CGI magic on Rudd.

Wow.

My mate and I had a blast watching this film, but we had the same level of fun watching ‘House of Gucci’ (2021) and other bad films. We entertain ourselves. But I do prefer to watch good films, and this is not that. It’s a flaccid piece of nothing that should have been direct to Tubi. Or Peacock. Or maybe just not made.