Jurassic Park is a horror franchise. Though it’s best remembered for its sense of awe and groundbreaking visual effects, Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 movie is also a scary gorefest, with brutal kills and plenty of dino jump scares. This is an element of that original winning formula that the reboot trilogy lacked: the horror influences that really sell the “fuck around and find out” tonal shift of Michael Crichton’s original novel. The movie version of Jurassic Park adapts those in a masterful way, as it goes from awe and admiration for its resurrected dinosaurs to sheer horror at the carnage that comes with them.
First-time writer-director Alex Scharfman is fully aware of Jurassic Park’s horror elements: His debut movie Death of a Unicorn is essentially a horror-comedy version of Spielberg’s film, taking inspiration from its tone, while grabbing story cues from his sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. You’ve got your rich criminals looking to exploit nature for profit, being hunted down by nearly fantastical creatures; a secluded location with access to the great outdoors; dangerous creatures looking for their missing child; and a dad and his daughter caught in the middle of it.
The balance of tones in Death of a Unicorn is effective, once we actually get to the carnage, though that takes a little while. First, there’s the inciting incident, with uptight lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) traveling to a massive estate in the Canadian Rockies with his estranged daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), who is still grieving the loss of her mother and would rather be anywhere but with her dad. Elliot is about to become the legal liaison for the head of a big pharma company, Odell Leopold (a delightfully exuberant Richard E. Grant), as his cancer enters final stages. En route to the mansion, battling seasonal allergies and his rebellious daughter’s eye rolls and complaints, Elliot accidentally crashes into a creature crossing the road — an actual unicorn.
When he realizes the creature isn’t fully dead, Elliot takes a tire iron to the unicorn’s brain, then hides the body in the car. (Why not just push it down the nearby forest slope?) Unluckily for him, the purple unicorn blood that gets all over Elliot and Ridley also cures her acne and his allergies. Making matters worse, the unicorn still isn’t entirely dead, and it makes enough noise that the Leopolds — a group of power-hungry, wealth-hoarding parasites — discover what Elliot is hiding, and immediately get dollar-sign eyes. Learning about the unicorn’s healing properties, they realize that harvesting its corpse could bring their pharma interests a massive fortune. Failing that, they could sell its blood and horn to oligarchs with health issues. There’s a teeny, tiny problem, however: The creature’s parents are worried about it, and they’re ready to pull a Liam Neeson in Taken to find and rescue their baby.
Death of a Unicorn lives and dies by its ensemble, and casting director Avy Kaufman deserves a lot of praise for bringing together this exquisite ensemble, which elevates a B-horror movie script into a hit. Each part is perfectly cast, from disgruntled butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan, continuing with the expressive demeanor and sunny disposition of his Barry character, NoHo Hank) to brash, arrogant charity-gala empress Belinda (Téa Leoni), who has roughly two brain cells. But the standout performance — the one likely to go viral when the movie hits VOD and clips start circulating online — is clearly Will Poulter as Odell and Belinda’s kid, the young, entitled Shepard. Poulter effortlessly slides into the role of an unhinged rich boy who thinks he’s a self-made entrepreneur with lots of big business insights, though his ideas largely amount to mixing drinks in the middle of a massacre, or snorting unicorn horn dust.
Scharfman’s eat-the-rich message fails to cover much that isn’t already familiar from other recent films, like Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, and the subplot involving Ridley grieving her mother ends up feeling shallow and distracting. But the magical premise and turn toward horror makes Death of a Unicorn stand out from other A24 projects. This movie essentially turns into Jurassic Park in its second half, as the Leopold estate is besieged by unicorns.
Granted, as we’ve seen time and time again with the Jurassic World trilogy, every director in that franchise who has tried following Spielberg ends up mostly just paying tribute to his imagery, and to specific sequences from those first two movies, rather than pushing the concept further. Scharfman does that too, bringing back staples from the first two Jurassic Park movies: the iconic kitchen raptor attack where creatures hunt their victims by smell, the moonlit hunt in tall grass. The unicorns even have retractable razor-like claws like the raptors.
But while Death of a Unicorn isn’t the second coming of Spielberg’s 1993 modern classic or the bonkers fun of its first sequel, it’s still an effective gore-fest. The movie shines the brightest when it becomes The Lost World: A Knives Out Comedy. The juxtaposition of the vicious, mean-spirited, yet cheer-worthy unicorn-themed violence with the absurdist comedy of the Leopolds trying to save face and think of their quarterly earnings makes for an exhilarating second half. DP Larry Fong shoots the hell out of the many kill sequences, with clear staging and dynamic action as guts are spilled and heads are stomped, or torn apart by massive teeth.
Unfortunately, in spite of involvement from Zoic Studios (Netflix’s live-action series The Witcher) on the digital side, Filmefex (The Terror) on the practical side, and even Wētā Workshop on the development side, the unicorns simply don’t look that good. The VFX at times looks unfinished, and the creatures rarely feel tactile, even when actual practical puppets are being used. There are a few moments when you can tell there’s a physical unicorn prop on screen, and those precious few moments make it hard not to wish for a different approach in the rest of the film.
Still, Death of a Unicorn delivers on its biggest promise — a gnarly, funny creature feature with a fantastic ensemble, and all the unicorn-themed gore you can imagine. It doesn’t reach the heights of the first two Jurassic Park movies, or even the one Téa Leoni was in. Scharfman’s constant homaging does work in its favor, both in using the true and tested elements of the earliest Jurassic Park movies and also in putting the lack of creativity of the Jurassic World trilogy to shame.
Death of a Unicorn hits U.S. theaters on March 28.
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