Have you ever seen one of those t-shirts where a unicorn impales a person? No? They’re pretty good. It’s funny to imagine one of these majestic, gentle creatures approaching another creature in apparent benevolence, then thrusting their horn through that creature’s chest cavity.

Death of a Unicorn is like the movie adaptation of that t-shirt. Of course, the unicorns here can’t be capricious killing machines like the hypothetical stabbers we imagine in the paragraph above. They have to be wronged, and a bunch of oblivious humans are just the ones to do it.

It’s a high-concept t-shirt idea of a movie, and occupies a similar space of WTF curiosity as Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear. And it has about the same amount of effectiveness: limited.

“Oh no they didn’t” gets you in the door, but then you have to do something with that. Death of a Unicorn fails to get the comedic buy-in from us on the whole setup, not quite having a moment in its first third that eloquently lays out what we have ahead of us and establishes a tone. A bear on cocaine or a murderous unicorn can whet our appetites, but then you have to deliver something that gives us both some of what we expect and some of what we don’t. Death of a Unicorn doesn’t do enough of that. It’s not skilfully written enough to put us in sync with what it thinks is its central joke.

Whenever you see distracted driving in a movie where the characters are traveling through a remote, sylvan landscape, you know what’s about to happen: They’re about to hit an animal. Of course, it’s no ordinary animal that Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) hit on their drive through the Canadian wilderness to arrive at the mansion of the terminally ill man (Richard E. Grant) whose estate Elliot is going to oversee. No, this has a clear protuberance out of its forehead, appearing horse-like in all other aspects.

No one says the “u” word until they’ve arrived at the compound and met the other people from whom they’re trying to conceal they have a unicorn corpse hidden in their boot: the sick man Odell’s wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and spoilt son Shepard (Will Poulter), as well as servants including Anthony Carrigan and Jessica Hynes. When the car starts bouncing around the driveway from the not-so-dead corpse of the unicorn, the rich family purport to be shocked, but they may know more than they’re letting on. They’ve been searching for a miracle cure for Odell’s cancer, and given that some unicorn blood has already corrected Elliot’s vision and allowed Ridley to wipe her acne off her face with a towel, there’s some serious profit potential in that blood and in the powdered dust of the horn.

Of course, dead is a thing that this unicorn basically never is, and what’s worse, it’s got two much larger, parental unicorns who are angry and want to kick some ass. Ass they kick.

Writer-director Alex Scharfman appears to understand he’s got the makings of some laugh-out-loud absurd comedy here, but he has no idea what to do with it. The movie tries to get, but doesn’t get, what the t-shirt got, which is that a rampaging unicorn must be played out with big gestures. There should be bloody and clever deaths like in the recent The Monkey, not just the expected bloody ways a psychopathic unicorn can impale someone. Scharfman thinks he’s holding the laughs out there for us, but we just can’t grasp them.

Anthony Corrigan’s character is a good example of that. The bald, unusual-looking comedic actor is used and abused by the family, to his eternal chagrin, as he’s always asked to fetch something involving a yell from wherever around the compound they’re sitting. We should find his eye rolls well earned, but the material that prompts them is weak sauce.

Due to Scharfman’s attempt to straddle moods here – there’s a lot of material devoted to Ridley’s deceased mother – he doesn’t make this family as over the top as they are begging to be. So yes, while having the family’s dickhead son yell across the complex for Griff to fetch a pair of bathers, then cancel the other with the same yell, is mildly annoying, it’s a better indicator of the movie’s half measures. We should be getting a wicked satire rather than a weak one. (And it wouldn’t hurt if the digital effects were a bit better.)

There’s entertainment to be had here, for sure. The setting of Death of a Unicorn, a remote location with no network services, does create a good contained laboratory for these insufficiently humanistic humans to scramble away from bloodthirsty unicorns. Examining characters in these environments, and how their dynamics shift, has given us some tight and strong comedic thrillers in recent years. There’s some thematic value to the notion of despoiling the beauty of nature for financial gain.

Death of a Unicorn is not tight, as it suffers through a belaboured final act, and it’s not strong enough to actually earn a recommendation. Maybe it’s just there was never more “there” there than the one-panel joke you’d find on the front of a shirt.

 

Death of a Unicorn is currently playing in cinemas.