Who is this film for? I wondered, as a monstrous computer-generated unicorn yanked out likewise generated entrails with its pointy horn and tossed them into the air. Watching Death of a Unicorn felt like living the consequences of a late-night, stoned riff on that 2010 unicorn meat meme. The gist is: ”What if unicorns make meat out of YOU?” but expanded to a runtime of 108 minutes. 

The violence in Death of a Unicorn is midnight-movie level, but the plot is like a moral, children's fantasy. Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) accidentally hits a baby unicorn with his car while en route to the bombastically timbered vacation mansion of his wildly wealthy pharmaceutical dynasty employers, the Leopolds. The Leopolds are modeled on the Sackler family, according to the film’s writer and director, Alex Scharfman—the set decoration includes a fake Taschen-style coffee table book entitled Pills: A Comprehensive Compendium of Pharmacology’s Most Beautiful Tablets and Capsules. 

Death of a Unicorn’s central plot arc hinges on whether or not Kintner’s daughter, (named Ridley, in an extremely obvious homage to the Alien franchise, and played with plausible teenage sullenness by Jenna Ortega) can save her father from the deadly consequences of the Leopolds’ avarice and convince him that there are more important things than getting a promotion (for example: surviving). 

Ridley’s attempts to save her dad take the form of internet research and yelling, while the Leopolds inject, snort, and carve steaks out of the baby unicorn’s corpse, and enormous shadowy unicorns with talons begin converging on the estate. She gets DEEP into an online K-hole on the Met’s Unicorn Tapestries, screaming her analysis to anyone within earshot. It’s both charming to see 15th-16th century fiber arts getting some cinematic attention, and it makes a body remember one of the reasons why the Alien franchise was so compelling—Ridley Scott didn’t stop to explain much of anything. The one time he tried, in Alien: Covenant (2017), well…let us not speak of Alien: Covenant, because it is hot garbage. 

More than anything, Death of a Unicorn is an example of a particular B-movie formula: Step 1)  A group of people converge on a remote location, innocent of what is to come, and 2) One by one, they're all murdered. It feels as old as those unicorn tapestries at the Met, though the oldest cinematic example I could find is The 9th Guest, a 1934 horror film that was damned with faint praise, at the time of its release, as “well photographed “and containing “an adequate amount of slaughter.”

The film's production company, A24, has built a solid business out of releasing variations of this plot. The Witch is one. So is Hereditary, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and Opus, (released just a few weeks ago). It’s a way to introduce first-time or early-career directors without too much risk. 

If the final result here is a little blah, well... there are things to like about Death of a Unicorn. Will Poulter (Shepard Leopold) and Téa Leoni (Belinda Leopold) clearly understand the B-movie assignment and chew scenery to the maximum level. Ridley is—astonishingly, for a teenage final girl —dressed like an actual awkward teenager, in an enormous hoodie and baggy track pants. Actual unicorn lore hinges a lot on virginity, but—in flagrant violation of the final girl trope—no mention is made of Ridley’s sex life. Instead the purity she employs is her lack of concern for their wealth, even as her father repeatedly tells her that it’s the only thing that can keep the two of them safe.

In promotional literature for Death of a Unicorn, Scharfman lays out the film as a generational allegory—the Leopold patriarch is the aging Boomer who will do anything to maintain his position at the top of society. His wife is a delusional, liberal Gen Xer. Shep, their son, is a hedonistic, tech-bro millennial. Ridley is supposed to be Gen Z—or rather, an older person’s fantasy of Gen Z. She's an example of, as Scharfman puts it, “how a younger generation might lead us somewhere else.” 

So maybe that’s who this movie is for—a hypothetical youth in a capacious hoodie, heart full of ire and earnestness, too busy hating on the oligarchy to even think of being horny. A unicorn ex machina, essentially. 

That hope that the next generation is going to fix all of our problems, though? That’s even older than murder cabin plots. You can make a horror movie valentine for the kids, but it’s a very rude fiction to expect them to save us. 

Death of a Unicorn opens in wide release on Fri March 28.