At the end of my screening of Death of a Unicorn at SXSW, director Alex Scharfman said that he wrote role Paul Rudd’s role specifically for him, having worked together on a previous, unmade project.
And that could be why Rudd feels like the best part of Scharfman’s directorial debut, alongside his on-screen daughter Jenna Ortega. Their success is symbiotic, with each character needing each other to grow and propel the film to a new level after plodding along for a good chunk of the runtime.
It’s the stuff surrounding Rudd-Ortega that feels one-note but with moments of entertainment pulled out by the talented ensemble.
Will Poulter, Richard E. Grant, and Tea Leoni feel monolithic in their representation of the pharmaceutical industry. The trio are a family that tries to profit from the titular dead unicorn’s blood and horn that have miraculous healing powers — powers that help cure Grant’s character’s cancer among other ailments throughout the film.
They are each absurdly entertaining, just hardly interesting, with Poulter being a coked-up finance bro, his father Grant being a power-hungry eccentric, and Leoni an enabler to both. Their antagonizing roles merely help propel Rudd’s character’s growth, battling Ortega’s character’s grounded sense of self.
The issues Ortega’s Ridley has with Big Pharma in the first act are certainly a tired stereotype of teenage angst. Thankfully, she pushes up against the aforementioned trio that is wonderfully woven by Scharfman. He gives Ortega her own agency with a strong emotional core that also ensnares Rudd.
Imagining either role occupied by any other actors is difficult. No notes on their central casting.
Their emotional core is what makes the film work, not the critique of Big Pharma or capitalism critique that has been pushed early in the marketing campaign. It’s certainly a portion to consider, but it wasn’t an overt agenda by Scharfman.
During the Q&A, Scharfman mentioned that the pharmaceutical angle was simply the first industry he used as a reason these characters are meeting and getting tracked down by vengeful unicorns for killing one of their own. Once he researched the depths of unicorn lore, it became all the more apparent it was a relevant field, and kept on going with it, as unicorns have traditionally been viewed as majestic healers. Sometimes pieces just come together on their own. Such seems to be the case here.
Death of a Unicorn may not be the smash hit I hoped it would be when it was first announced that Rudd and Ortega would be in an A24 film together. But it does a lot of things well, just not in its entirety. It’s never boring, but if you gave me the choice to spend a couple of hours between this or The Accountant 2 (also at SXSW), I’ll take the latter any day.
