» REVIEW: ‘Death of a Unicorn’ is a swing and a myth

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A decent idea is beaten to death with CGI gore, clumsy filmmaking and the help of some talented players in “Death of a Unicorn,” the writing-directing feature debut of indie producer Alex Scharfman (“Blow the Man Down,” “Resurrection”). The movie poses several questions, foremost among them: What if unicorns really existed? What if their horns had mystical healing properties? What if they had the misfortune to live near the weekend retreat of the Sackler family?

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They’re called the Leopolds in the movie, but the notion of an obscenely wealthy, morally challenged pharmaceutical clan clearly has real-world analogues. When “Death of a Unicorn” opens, Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd), an attorney in the family’s employ, is driving up to the Leopold estate somewhere in the vastness of a generic great north woods. (Yes, this is the latest in a recent run of movies set in a billionaire’s private kingdom – I wonder where that notion comes from?) He’s accompanied by Ridley (Jenna Ortega), his disaffected teenage daughter – again, is there any other kind in movies? – and the standard generational awkwardness is interrupted when their car hits a four-legged bump in the road. It’s not a deer, or a moose, it’s a – you guessed it.

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The movie truly gets started when they bring the animal’s body to their hosts’ mansion and we meet the Leopolds: Patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant), wheezily dying of a terminal illness; his airy, entitled wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni); and their son, Shepard (Will Poulter), a swaggering nepo baby and wannabe tech bro. Things perk up immediately, because here you have three very gifted comic actors from three generations and corners of the entertainment universe. Scharfman’s dialogue is bright and brutal, and Leoni knows exactly how to pitch a line like “We were just evacuating some refugees … or, wait, were we vaccinating them?”

When the unicorn’s magical powers are revealed – it makes acne and cancer go poof – the Leopolds toss their pose of philanthropic benevolence aside for teeth-baring greed and self-interest, and they assume their guests will follow suit. The company’s head of pharmaceutical research (Steve Park) is called in to turn the sunporch into a vivisection theatre, accompanied by an assistant (comic actress Sunita Mani) who clearly has mixed feelings about the whole thing. Elliot is on board when he’s promised a cut of the profits, while daughter Ridley, horrified at the turn of events, is off in the library studying up on the renowned medieval Unicorn Tapestries, which she realizes tell a gruesome tale of capture and carnage.

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This “Death of a Unicorn” (no relation to the 1982 novel of the same name by Peter Dickinson) plays like what it most likely was in the screenwriting process: a satire of Big Pharma and skulduggery among the 1 percent that got shoehorned into the confines of a horror movie to make it more commercial. Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects. Suffice it to say that there’s more than one unicorn in the woods, they’re not the benign creatures of legend, and they’re angry.

Most disappointing, the filmmakers have cast Rudd in the straight-man role, wasting a master of blue-eyed irony on thankless dad dialogue. (Ortega doesn’t fare much better.) On the upside, the peerless Grant (forever Withnail in 1987’s “Withnail and I”) gets to show off both his sniveling and breezily arrogant sides, and Poulter, whom some of us have had our eye on since “Son of Rambow” back in 2007, continues to be one of the savviest wild cards of his acting generation, a handsome hunk with crack comic timing and an undercurrent of genuine weirdness. To watch his character snort a line of ground-up unicorn horn is to witness a very special brand of lunacy.

Would that the rest of “Death of a Unicorn” were worthy of that moment and its cast in general. Sadly, this one gets chalked up as a near myth.

Rated R. At area theatres. Strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use. 104 minutes.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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