If movies were still regularly presented that way, Alex Scharfman’s feature-filmmaking debut, Death of a Unicorn, would be a natural double-header contender with Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. Both are on-the-nose, eat-the-rich comedies with zany sci-fi flourishes whose ultimate optimism might have been a little more stomachable a few years ago, when the destructiveness of clueless, rapacious oligarchs didn’t have the same increasingly apocalyptic-feeling bent that it does now. In other words: they feel made, to paraphrase my boyfriend after we saw Mickey 17 a few weeks ago, for a gloating progressive audience living in an alternate universe where Kamala won.
Death of a Unicorn is slightly more focused than the entertaining but unusually sloppy-for-Bong Mickey 17. But it’s the far lesser of the two movies, hitting its targets with ideological kid gloves and made with hired-gun indistinctness. It’s set almost entirely in one location — the ornate, deep-in-the-countryside compound of a Sackler-like family (Richard E. Grant, Will Poulter, and Téa Leoni) — because its pushover compliance-lawyer protagonist, Elliot (Paul Rudd), is spending the weekend there to wrap up a vague deal he’s confident will financially set him and his over-it teenage daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), up for life. The latter is plus-oneing since Elliot figures that the family, the Leopolds, will be more malleable to the agreements he needs them to make if it comes with a dose of upper-middle-class pity. (Ridley’s mother and Elliot’s wife died a few years ago from cancer.)
Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega in Death of a Unicorn. All Death of a Unicorn imagery courtesy of A24.
It’s more than a bad omen when, en route to their destination, Elliot — an awful driver who protractedly squints at texts and lets incessant sneezing take his eyes off the road for scary stretches of time — hits what seems to be a horse. Upon closer inspection, it’s actually a unicorn, as pristine and white as one’s childhood fantasies might have envisioned. Elliot decides to “mercifully” bludgeon it with a tire iron, though not before Ridley grabs hold of its welcomingly glowing horn and is briefly transported to what appears to be another dimension.
The two manage to lug the body into the backseat of their rented car, hoping to keep the accident hidden until they can sneakily bury the remains. But a couple things foil their tenuous plan. Unicorns, as this film imagines them, never really die, so it’s not long before conversations are interrupted by the confused and frustrated equine trying to forcefully free itself of Elliot’s cramped Land Rover. And when it becomes clear, in front of this big pharma-rich family, that the creature’s royal-purple blood has magical healing properties — some grisly splattering during Elliot’s mercy-killing reverses his bad eyesight and allergies and rids Ridley’s cheeks of their pesky acne clusters — they inevitably want nothing else than to suck its corpse dry for for-its-own-sake monetary gain, especially after the family’s terminally ill patriarch (Grant) successfully parlays the substance to become miraculously cured and sprier than he was prediagnosis. “It’s like an NFT,” one Leopold decides of the blood.
Grant’s gameness infectiously translates in his performance; ditto the other actors playing his faux family members. Poulter particularly makes impressive use of his cartoon-supervillain eyebrows, and Leoni, getting most of the film’s best lines, made me laugh loudest when she drolly started a sentence with “not to be a size queen, but —.” These great actors’ roles also feel like Xerox copies of the exasperatingly out-of-touch caricatures seen in, for example, Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc whodunits. Scharfman, akin to other directors working in a similar mode of 1-percenter satire post-Bong’s own Parasite (2019), is clever without stating much more besides the obvious about what makes the superrich so contemptible, mocking personalities more than the systems breeding them.
Téa Leoni, Richard E. Grant, Will Poulter, and Paul Rudd in Death of a Unicorn.
Death of a Unicorn becomes something of a slasher movie once the unicorn’s demonic-looking family, hours into the Leopolds’ body-exploiting experiments, shows up, looking for revenge and undeterred by the mansion’s maze-like terrain. Scharfman has no real feel for suspense, though the kills are at least as operatically gory as one might hope for in a movie where those responsible for a series of gnarly homicides have pointy horns that make swords look comparatively dainty. But that bracing brutality feels voided by the film’s mawkish last few moments of familial reconnection, which are so incongruous with everything preceding it that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they were a joke.
Most persuasive about Death of a Unicorn is Ortega, whose remarkable expressiveness is effectively used throughout the movie, misguided finale included. Everyone else in the film is efficient while feeling confined to the type they’ve been assigned to embody. Designated as the movie’s moral compass — the kind to say correct things like “philanthropy is representation-laundering for the oligarchy” with the sort of conviction that makes it sound, for a moment, less didactic than it is — Ortega, so often better than the movies in which she’s appeared in her short career, is the only part of Death of a Unicorn likely to make a lasting impression.
Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo in Bob Trevino Likes It. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions.
Lonely Lily’s narcissistic, immature father, Bob (French Stewart), sucks so much that when she shares her life story with an inexperienced young therapist during an introductory session, the therapist can’t restrain herself from bursting into tears. So it’s no wonder that after he has yet another no-contact, weeks-long tantrum, a replacement-minded Lily (a phenomenal Barbie Ferreira) impulsively starts corresponding via Facebook with a receptive man with her dad’s same name (John Leguizamo) amid her yearning for a nontoxic father figure.
Deception fortunately has no place in writer-director Traci Laymon’s semi-autobiographical debut feature, Bob Trevino Likes It, a film I worried might see the deeply hurting Lily impetuously lying to this new man in her life that he’s her long-lost father. Instead it’s a touching, emotionally honest movie about two vulnerable people striking up the kind of odd friendship that both rids them of their difficult-to-contend-with solitude and helps them work through some of the hang-ups that have brought them to existential standstills.
Lily’s mother’s early abandonment and her years enduring her father’s manipulative, nothing-is-ever-my-fault noxiousness has turned the 20-something into a passive woman who always assumes the worst about herself and retreats in moments begging for self-assertion. (Played by a charming Lolo Spencer, the paraplegic woman Lily works for as a live-in aide will get to a point where she can’t help but wonder aloud why Lily, whom she considers a friend, is so cautious about opening up.) Bob from Facebook lives a quiet life with his perpetually scrapbooking wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), who gently encourages her husband to try to go out socializing more often. His resistance around getting close to anyone is suggested to be the result of his and Jeanie’s son dying soon after birth from an untreatable ailment, something the movie treats both with delicacy and eventual gut-punching purposes. Bob Trevino Likes It’s simple aims will compile in a way that comes to feel momentous for those who don’t, like me, find it superfluously saccharine. It’s the rare weeper that feels like it really earns whatever tears it makes you shed.
Peterson Reviews 