Eviscerated bodies. Purple blood. And killer unicorns. That’s the recipe that made “Death of a Unicorn” one of the surprise discoveries at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it premiered on Saturday to a raucous reception.
The film follows father and daughter Elliot and Ridley Kintner (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega), who are visiting Elliot’s billionaire boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) at his lavish mansion deep in the Canadian wilderness. To their utter shock and disbelief, they accidentally hit a young unicorn while en route. Because they’re in the middle of a nature preserve, they pack the body into their rental and bring it with them, hoping — in vain — to keep Odell, his smoothly unscrupulous wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and his layabout, dilettante son Shepard (Will Poulter) unawares.
Once the Leopolds learn that the unicorn’s blood cured Ridley’s acne and Elliot’s allergies, they start rapaciously harvesting the animal’s body for its miracle cure properties — blithely ignoring Ridley’s warnings about how unicorns, according to medieval lore, are actually vicious monsters.
It’s at this point that the unicorn’s parents show up, and begin vivisecting the Leopold’s scientists and security staff in pursuit of their child’s body. Writer-director Alex Scharfman, making an auspicious directorial debut, had the audience rolling in cycles of uproarious laughter, terrified screams, and triumphant cheers as (spoiler alert for the thing that happens in these movies) the Leopolds are dispatched in outlandishly gory ways.
“It was so fun, and you guys cheering — that was really special,” Leoni said to the SXSW audience in the Q&A following the premiere. She then shouted out to the film’s prop team: “When I was dying, they warmed up the guts for me. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?”
Elliot and Ridley’s frayed relationship is the emotional center of the film, so it was surprising to when Ortega said “we started shooting the movie a day or two after we met.”
“Fortunately we had the experience,” Rudd added. “Jenna is a daughter in real life, and I’m actually a dad.”
The audience reserved their loudest and longest applause for Anthony Carrigan, who just about steals the movie with his largely wordless performance as the Leopold’s long-suffering butler, Griff.
“Lines are great,” Carrigan said. “But the moments of responding to all of these incredible actors and what they were doing, I just had a ball. Sometimes you don’t need to say anything.”
Grant then followed up with this non sequitur: “Because I’m the oldest person in this room, and there were no moral police in Hungary, the fact that we had group sex on a daily basis…” The rest of the cast started to laugh, and then Grant hugged Leoni from behind and began to hump her, seemingly as a joke. Leoni quickly peeled herself off of Grant while smiling, and Ortega crouched down on the floor.
When the moderator asked why, she pivoted the conversation back to Carrigan, saying that she and Rudd “didn’t realize until two thirds into the movie that he had a Scottish accent” as Griff.
“Death of a Unicorn” opens in theaters on March 28.
