With more fake pimples on one cheek than she’s ever had in her entire real life, gorgeously talented Jenna Ortega – who we love in Wednesday – plays Ridley Kintner, a teenager, who with her father encounters a real-life unicorn, when they run it over.
Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, the filmmaker’s audacious debut feature film Death of a Unicorn, is an absurdist horror-comedy that delivers wickedly dark humour, and over-the-top gory spectacles, with an unexpected punch of understated sweetness.
The film follows Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and Ridley, who accidentally hit the baby unicorn while enroute to a crisis management summit with Elliot’s boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), and his family. When Ridley touches the copse’s horn, she experiences strange cosmic visions, which Elliot abruptly stops after he bludgeons the creature with a tire iron (remember the ‘not for the kiddies’ part?)
Shortly after their arrival at Leopold’s estate, Ridley discovers that the unicorn’s blood has cleaned away the acne on her face (insert I-told-you-so emoji), and Elliot’s vision has improved, and his allergies are gone. Leopold seizes the unicorn, which is ‘mysteriously’ alive again, and his scientists discover that the creature is endowed with supernaturally curative properties, which Leopold seeks to exploit. However, as they delve deeper into their research, the unicorn’s un-fairy-tale-like parents arrive and begin to slaughter, one by one, those involved in the exploitation of the dead (again?) creature.
This has some fun stuff, but the annoying vegan in me isn’t so sure – unicorns are animals too y’know…
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