The "eat-the-rich" subgenre has dominated contemporary cinema for the better part of a decade, to the point where audiences are well-acquainted with the cinematic mechanics of watching the ultra-wealthy suffer. From the gastronomic bloodbath of Mark Mylod’s The Menu to the nautical nausea of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, filmmakers have repeatedly taken a sledgehammer to the top one percent, dissecting late-stage capitalism with varying degrees of subtlety and venom. Enter Death of a Unicorn, the 2025 dark fantasy horror-comedy that attempts to inject a dose of ancient, untamed myth into the sterile boardrooms of the billionaire class. Serving as the ambitious directorial debut of Alex Scharfman - and backed by the indie prestige behemoth A24 alongside Square Peg and Secret Engine - the film premiered to a deeply divided and visibly polarized audience at the SXSW Film Festival in early March, before its wider North American theatrical release later that month.
It is a film that swings wildly for the fences, attempting an audacious alchemy of creature-feature gore, corporate satire, and strained family drama. Yet, for all its structural ambition, provocative visual metaphors, and a glittering ensemble cast that seems game for the madness, the resulting cinematic brew is a remarkably erratic proposition. Death of a Unicorn is a project that struggles to sustain its own conceptual weight, navigating a notoriously difficult tonal tightrope that ultimately leaves it caught somewhere between a brilliant societal indictment and a chaotic, B-movie creature feature.
Roadkill on the Path to the Corporate Elite
The premise of Death of a Unicorn is undeniably brilliant in its sheer, blunt-force absurdity, establishing its thematic intentions within the first twenty minutes. The narrative centres on Elliot Kintner, played by the perpetually affable Paul Rudd, a mid-level corporate lawyer desperate to secure his footing and prove his indispensable value within the ruthless upper echelons of his firm. Accompanied by his cynical, heavily alienated teenage daughter, Ridley - portrayed with expectedly sharp-edged, deadpan precision by Jenna Ortega - Elliot is en route to an exclusive weekend retreat. Their destination is the sprawling, heavily fortified, and aggressively isolating estate of his billionaire employer, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant).
It is on this fog-drenched, winding road to corporate sycophancy that the film’s inciting incident violently occurs: Elliot’s vehicle collides with a massive, equine figure emerging from the gloom. Upon panicked inspection in the harsh glare of the headlights, the roadkill is revealed to not be a wayward deer or a lost horse, but a literal unicorn.
This collision serves as the film’s central metaphorical rupture. The unicorn, a universal, ancient symbol of purity, magic, and untainted innocence, is immediately reduced to a frantic problem of liability and, subsequently, a grotesque opportunity for exploitation. Scharfman uses this instigating crash to brilliantly strip away the veneer of modern civility. Rather than reporting the impossible incident or treating the creature with the reverence such a myth demands, Elliot and Ridley make the panicked, morally bankrupt decision to drag the heavy carcass to the billionaire’s compound to hide their crime. It is a narrative choice that rapidly accelerates the film’s descent into ethical squalor, setting the stage for a ruthless examination of what happens when the sacred and the miraculous are introduced to a predatory ecosystem of corporate elites who only understand the world in terms of acquisition and leverage.
A Cast Caught in the Crosshairs of Genre
Scharfman has assembled a formidable, highly capable cast to execute his bizarre vision, but the actors frequently find themselves battling the film’s wildly fluctuating tones, resulting in performances that feel as though they belong in slightly different movies. Paul Rudd is perhaps the film’s most fascinating casting masterstroke. For decades, Rudd has weaponised his inherent likability, building an immensely successful career on playing well-meaning, slightly hapless, and charming everymen. Here, Scharfman subverts that ingrained persona entirely, asking the audience to watch the quintessential "nice guy" slowly succumb to the seductive, corrupting influence of wealth and his desperate proximity to power. Elliot’s initial shock and horror at the creature’s death quickly mutates into a calculating scramble to use the carcass as leverage with his impossibly wealthy boss, a dark transition that Rudd handles with a creeping, unsettling desperation that sheds his usual comedic warmth.
Opposite him, Jenna Ortega operates within a highly familiar but undeniably effective register. As Ridley, she is the designated audience surrogate, observing the grotesque moral contortions of the adults around her with a detached, generation-Z cynicism. Building upon her status as a modern scream queen and the stoic centre of Wednesday, Ortega brings a grounded intelligence to the absurdity. However, the script occasionally strands her in a purely reactionary position, giving her little to do but scowl at the escalating depravity until she is forced into action during the film’s chaotic final act.
The retreat’s host, Odell Leopold, is brought to life by Richard E. Grant, who gleefully devours every piece of opulent scenery within reach. Grant plays the billionaire not as a calculated, quiet mastermind, but as an infantile, petulant apex predator - a man whose unimaginable wealth has completely severed his tether to basic human empathy or consequence. Filling out the ensemble are Téa Leoni and Will Poulter, both of whom add distinct flavors to the toxic retreat environment. Poulter, in particular, emerges as the film's undeniable standout. He navigates the messy intersection of horror and comedy with an instinctive comedic timing that much of the surrounding film lacks, leaning into the absurdity of the situation while providing a much-needed, highly entertaining grounding element amidst the narrative and thematic chaos.
The Commodification of the Sacred
The satirical core of Death of a Unicorn reveals itself fully once Odell Leopold and his sycophantic entourage discover the unicorn's body stashed by Elliot. In true, ruthless capitalist fashion, any sense of awe or reverence for the mythical beast is fleeting; the immediate, overriding imperative is to figure out how to monetise, extract, and consume it. The group soon discovers that the unicorn’s blood and its iconic horn possess miraculous, regenerative properties. This grim discovery accelerates the film’s cultural commentary into overdrive, presenting a literal, visceral translation of the vampiric nature of the ultra-rich.
Here, Scharfman is explicitly taking aim at the modern wellness industry, Silicon Valley's disturbing obsession with life extension and biohacking, and the sheer, unadulterated entitlement of the billionaire class who operate under the delusion that even immortality can be acquired for the right price. The consumption of the unicorn becomes a grotesque, blood-stained parody of luxury dining and pharmaceutical extraction.
Yet, this is also where the film's thematic limitations become glaringly apparent, exposing the script's foundational weaknesses. While the imagery is visually striking and occasionally nauseating, the underlying critique feels distinctly thin. In a post-Succession media landscape, audiences are already acutely aware of the sociopathy and depravity of the ultra-wealthy. Death of a Unicorn successfully points out that billionaires will consume the miraculous simply to preserve their own skin, but it fails to offer any novel insights into the mechanics of that greed or the systems that enable it. The satire lacks the surgical precision required to elevate it from a basic, recognizable "eat-the-rich" diatribe into something truly profound or challenging. It relies on the shock value of the metaphor rather than deepening the conversation around wealth inequality.
When the Herd Arrives: Creature Feature Mechanics
Where Death of a Unicorn stumbles as a cerebral, finely tuned satire, it partially redeems itself as a chaotic, blood-soaked creature feature in its final third. For the first two acts, the film operates primarily as a dark comedy of manners, confined to the sprawling interiors and manicured lawns of Odell’s estate. But Scharfman eventually pivots to outright, unrelenting horror, introducing a narrative twist that violently shifts the power dynamic: unicorns are not solitary creatures, and this murdered beast has a family.
When the vengeful herd arrives to reclaim their fallen kin and punish the transgressors, the film entirely abandons its dialogue-heavy critique in favor of visceral, fast-paced survival horror. The cinematography by Larry Fong - known for his stylized, muscular work on massive studio blockbusters - captures the nocturnal carnage with a distinct, shadowy menace, transforming the luxurious estate into a claustrophobic slaughterhouse.
The unicorns themselves are a divisive visual element, purposefully engineered to subvert expectations. Scharfman relies on a mixture of practical effects and CGI that occasionally falters under the harsh security lighting of the estate, but there is a deliberate, ugly quality to the creatures when they attack. Stripping away their majestic, glittering mythology, the film reveals them as ruthless, imposing, and bloodthirsty animals capable of immense physical destruction.
This tonal shift is undeniably jarring, directly earning the film its reputation as a "flavorless genre mélange" among some of its harsher critics. The transition from sharp-tongued boardroom satire to a monster movie where tech billionaires are brutally gored by mythical beasts is a whiplash-inducing pivot that alienated a portion of the SXSW audience. The original score by Dan Romer and Giosuè Greco desperately tries to bridge this massive tonal gap, utilizing sweeping, magical strings that slowly curdle into dissonant, chaotic noise, but the two halves of the film ultimately feel as though they belong to completely different, competing projects.
A Tonal Mishmash With a Nasty Bite
In assessing the final product, Death of a Unicorn emerges as a deeply flawed but undeniably fascinating artefact of 2025 contemporary cinema. Alex Scharfman’s directorial debut is visibly weighed down by the sheer volume of its own towering ambitions. It desperately wants to be a poignant family drama about a disconnected father and daughter, a razor-sharp indictment of wealth inequality, and a midnight-movie gore-fest all within a standard runtime. Unsurprisingly, it drops several of these spinning plates before the final credits roll.
However, there is a distinct, undeniable value in the film's chaotic audacity. In an era where studio filmmaking frequently retreats into algorithmic safety and easily digestible franchise fare, Death of a Unicorn is a messy, uncompromising, and deeply strange piece of original work. The violent collision of Paul Rudd’s affable anxiety, Jenna Ortega’s modern scream-queen sensibilities, and Richard E. Grant’s aristocratic villainy generates enough friction to sustain the viewer's attention, even when the script fundamentally loses its thematic thread. It may not possess the intellectual rigor necessary to redefine the modern cinematic satire, nor the sustained dread required of a pure horror film, but it stands as a wild, blood-splattered reminder of the rot at the core of the American elite - a bleak cinematic landscape where nothing, not even a bona fide miracle, is safe from the slaughterhouse of corporate greed.
