Imagine the breath on that thing
dir: Alex Scharfman
2025
Stupid premises can still make for interesting / amusing movies. I’m not going to pretend this is a particularly great film, but it did amuse me. It kept me amused, and it didn’t overstay its welcome, which is important.
It is important not because my time is valuable – it is because stupid premises don’t justify running times over 90 minutes, and passing that they make you want to chew your own leg off in order to escape a cinema you voluntarily walked into.
Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd, and while a lot of people might love him he in and of himself is not really enough of a drawcard to pull an audience into a theatre, if that audience includes me. I don’t know if Jenna Ortega has a massive fanbase based on Wednesday, but she would presumably be the main attraction here, unless it’s the unicorns people desperately want to see.
Or maybe I’m underestimating how many Richard E. Grant fans there are out there, absolute Withnail and I diehards.
The overall premise is less “what if unicorns were real?” and more so “rich people are awful, and do awful things to anything and anyone and have a supportive world that justifies all their worst self-serving actions”. I can even see a world in which they get to spin this flick with them as the “good guys” – “Commie pinkos try to tear down a hard working family that happens to run a pharmaceutical company, when all they want to do is cure cancer and maximise shareholder value”.
The real villain in this is Paul Rudd, as a shitty father and even worse as a handmaiden to rich fucks who seek at all times to remind the lower orders that they are lower and thus expendable, and must be expended. The rich fucks are monsters in the way that we expect them to be, within expected parameters.
But the unicorns, plural? They’re straight out of our worst nightmares.
As mythical creatures on film unicorns haven’t exactly had their day in the sun. Maybe it seemed like they were primed for reinvention, kinda like Madonna or Kylie reinventing themselves for some new album. But our media, or at least the media I’ve consumed over the last however many years, doesn’t seem like it’s contained a whole bunch of unicorn depictions to the point where we’d be fucking sick of them. Not like vampires, werewolves, mermaids or Kardashians.
The only time I can think of where they’ve been in a popular show was years ago in the animated tv series Gravity Falls where they were depicted as being foul-mouthed shit-stirrers that deserved a beating for being such arseholes, or at least one of them did. The show, too, posited the idea that the cantankerous creatures had magical cure-all blood that you needed to beat the crap out of them to get.
This flick maybe takes that idea and elevates it significantly, making the unicorns magically immortal but also monstrously violent. Death of a Unicorn clearly must have unicorn death in it, but it’s far more focussed on what life they could potentially provide, if they were exploited by late stage capitalism in just the right way.
You would think maybe a movie would bother to give us a set of rich bastards who start out being depicted as decent people whose greed overtakes them in the end, but this flick doesn’t bother with that. The Leopold husband and wife team, and their awful shorts-wearing offspring are depicted as appalling plutocrats from beginning to end. I’m not saying they could have gotten us to care about billionaires first before betraying our tender sensibilities, because fuck that, but it could have made their characters a bit more interesting.
The elder Leopold is dying, so inevitably the option of using something taken from the unicorn in order to grant a temporary respite from the Reaper’s grim scythe is strongly appealing, but that would be a reasonably human impulse, or reaction. It’s not enough for these kinds of people to be grateful, to have been granted extra days when it seems like death’s door was beckoning. No, no, they not only have to wallow in unicorn gore and viscera, they have to find a way to somehow commodify and commercialise the unicorn’s essence and sell it to the highest bidder.
The Paul Rudd character, who is not wealthy, who has recently lost his wife, and is saddled with a daughter that loathes him and that he doesn’t understand at all, finds himself having to agree with his masters in every circumstance, meaningful or not, in order to maintain their favour, which can be withdrawn at any moment. It also forces him to side against his daughter in every altercation.
For some reason the Ortega character is called Ridley, and she’s something of a drip, but she at least is right. She warns the rich fucks repeatedly that the unicorns will come and kill them, and they ridicule her at first, listen to her when the killings start, and try to co-opt her in final desperation in order to continue their pathetic lives, but at no stage do they acknowledge that she was right and they were wrong to do what they did. Their right to do whatever the fuck they imagine is always paramount.
It sounds like it would be fun to wear shorts all the time, or yell things out to a butler that the butler is expected to do at a moment’s notice, or to shoot things or people at will, or live in a massive mansion in the Rocky Mountains or wherever they are (I think those parts of the flick were filmed in Hungary), but these people aren’t really enjoying themselves. Hollow, horrible people, but Eliot (Rudd) wants the crumbs from their table because he thinks it’s the only way to protect his daughter, who hates them and hates him anyway. I mean, not in a meaningful way, just in an eye-rolly perpetual teenaged way. Ridley never wanted to be there anyway for this magical weekend that was meant to seal the deal with the rich fucks for her dad’s future employment, but she listens to the Cocteau Twins so she must be cool.
When her dad, being the arsehole that he is for 99% of the film, runs over an actual unicorn, she gets to somehow connect to some kind of cosmic consciousness when she touches the wounded creature’s horn. Her father, not for the only time in the flick, keeps doing perplexing and idiotic things like trying to finish off the unicorn using a tire iron, and “kills” it just as she’s reaching this higher level of shared consciousness.
The bloodspray from the murder cures her acne and his short-sightedness, the acne being a debilitating condition that they refer to and emphasise so often you’d think she was suffering from melanoma, but from then on it’s an excuse for people with everything to want more, More, MORE! It’s not the only dumb thing the script requires Paul Rudd to do in the service of this character and this stupendous plot. Ridley does her own research by looking up some stuff online, which completely and accurately, based on some tapestries from 500 years ago, predict what’s going to happen, in terms of how most of the rich fucks are going to bite the big one, but it means she has to be ignored and repeat herself about five times. Something, or a sequence repeated five times or more is by any definition repetitive. Repetitive isn’t necessarily dull, but…
The way they stretch out the flick, which I previously said didn’t outstay its welcome, can still feel somewhat pointless, belaboured, unnecessary. The central rich fucks have a son (Will Poulter), and he does little other than make the audience grind their teeth with every dumb thing he does or says or every time he snorts a line of unicorn horn because of course he does. We already loathe you people; you’ve already struck oil, stop drilling.
Tea Leoni plays the last part of the Leopold family equation but the only thing very memorable about her performance is her character’s death, which is chef’s kiss perfect. I mean it’s hideously grotesque, but this flick is banking on us being so thoroughly disgusted with the ways and speech of billionaires that it imagines us slavering over their deaths like the poor peasants that we are.
Sometimes a story about class differences between our wealthy betters and us unwashed oiks don’t need to be more complicated than aristocrats meeting their maker through the intercession of a very guillotine-like set of unicorns, but I think it could have had some actual humour in it, which would have maybe helped a bit to make it a tad more entertaining. The lines they give the rich people don’t really land that well, and only make them seem lacking in self-awareness until the unicorns rip them to pieces.
Some of the lines they give the poor people don’t land that well either. Having Ortega yell “It’s a fucking unicorn!” in the early stages of the film was maybe funny, but some of the lines they gave the “help” needed to be a bit more acerbic to really hit home. Long suffering butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan) had potential, that’s all I’m going to say, and though he has at least one believable reaction (when he says “fuck it” and prioritises his own safety), the rest of the time he keeps copping abuse and accepting it, without a decent cathartic moment.
For a film about a horse girl and her horned murder horse buddies, I guess I didn’t find much to complain about. I was promised a set of magic killer ponies eating people and generally causing havoc, and that’s what they delivered. It feels churlish to complain, and I don’t want to be a churl.
While I may like Rudd and Ortega, and even most of the rest of the people in the flick, honestly, the mawkish, unearned ending didn’t do that much for me. Everyone else pays for their hubris, for their awfulness, but not apparently the ageless Paul Rudd playing this character, piece of shit that he must be. No comeuppance for him! Grr! I boo what you did and what you’re doing, boo!
6 ways Death of a Unicorn as a title is a fucking lie out of 10
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“And here's hoping we kill Bigfoot on the way back.” – always more more more with you people - Death of a Unicorn
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