Death of a Unicorn (2025)

The unicorn, that most reliable of mythical beasts, arrives in Alex Scharfman's debut as roadkill. A lawyer named Elliot and his daughter Ridley strike the creature on a mountain road, then carry the carcass to the estate of his billionaire employer, where a family of grotesques discovers that its blood cures cancer, acne, and poor eyesight. The Leopolds scheme to bottle and sell it. This is a broad, splattery send-up of corporate greed and bioprospecting, and it knows exactly which direction to point the cannon.

The supporting cast is admirably mixed, with Sunita Mani, Steve Park, and Anthony Carrigan doing competent work in roles that never announce themselves as statements. Ridley, played by Jenna Ortega, becomes the movie's conscience, the lone figure who grasps that the animal deserves better than a laboratory. Her position rests on the old pure-hearted maiden device, the unicorn going docile in her presence, which is less a feminist argument than a fairy-tale inheritance. She lectures the family on ethics, and the lectures do not land. The satire of wealth is loud, obvious, and oddly toothless.

Where the film tries something stranger is in its handling of the medieval Unicorn Tapestries. Ridley has studied them, and the closing credits fold the movie's own carnage into a conjectured restoration of the Maiden panel, recasting an artifact as prophecy. It is a modest act of historical rearrangement, more decorative than subversive. No climate sermon, no racial reckoning, no meditation on the body's imperfections beyond a convenient cure for blemishes. The unicorns trample the wealthy, the survivors are arrested, and the credits roll on a joke about insurance. A creature feature with ambitions above its station.