Death of a Unicorn Review: Fairytale Slasher

Death of a Unicorn has decent performances, but they cannot save a predictable script with a nonsensical gimmick.

The story begins with single father Elliott Kintner (Paul Rudd, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) traveling to the wilderness of Canada for a business meeting. On the way, Elliott strikes a baby unicorn, causing a crisis situation over how to break the news to the public. Eliott’s employer Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant, Love Actually), his wife Belinda (Tea Leoni, The Teachers’ Lounge) and their son Shepard (Will Poulter, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) immediately seek to exploit the creature and harness its power for the pharmaceutical industry. When the unicorn’s parents come looking for their baby, things go bloody and nonsensical fast. 

Something like Death of a Unicorn seems like a premise for a joke movie in a sitcom. You know just from the title this will be as campy and insane as possible, and there is certainly some of that. The performances are excellent, with each actor taking this premise more seriously than they need to. Jenna Ortega and Will Poulter are standouts as the younger stars, serving as two opposing worldviews for study of the unicorns. Ripley wants to try understanding the beasts; Shepard just wants to snort their pixie dust. The movie would have been more interesting if there were more scenes exploring the Leopolds’ ruthless practices over the slasher film parts. It feels like a polished family drama which just happens to have unicorns, and if the unicorns are the least interesting part, that is a problem. 

There is a decent idea for a deeper premise here with the Leopold family. Their practices in pharmaceuticals show the corruption of the industry, and their ruthlessness in exploiting the environment to achieve these gains. If unicorns were real, it would make sense to have their healing powers utilized in medicine. Their actions and motivations are the most interesting part of the movie. Sadly, these are offset by the routine and clichéd patterns of the deaths. The characters you think will die fall in exactly the order you think they will. Their deaths are played up in the most gory, over the top way possible, and it detracts from the actual tension and suspense leading up to this. 

Unicorns being depicted as monsters is an old idea, with the giant horn being an obvious cool weapon. While the folklore and backstory behind these ideas is interesting and explored in the film, the unicorns themselves are unimpressive kaiju and could have been substituted for dragons or anything else. All these elements make for a tonal contrast, with Death of a Unicorn having trouble staying in one lane.

Death of a Unicorn is a funny idea for an edgy middle schooler, but it’s a bit immature and trite outside of that. Corrupting something childish and wholesome is an overdone tradition, and if you see one of these types of movies, you have basically seen them all. The Leopold family and their corrupt practices add a bit more intelligence to the story, but all the rest follows horror clichés which have been played a thousand times over. There is a market for this kind of movie, but it is a selective one.

Death of a Unicorn had its World Premiere at SXSW on March 8-9, 2025. The film will be released in theaters in the US and Canada on March 28, 2025 and in UK cinemas on April 4. Read our SXSW reviews and our list of films to watch at SXSW 2025!