Spoilers below.
In the zany, bloody A24 monster comedy Death of a Unicorn, there are any number of strange circumstances the actress Jenna Ortega must contend with: a car crash with a mythological creature, a psychedelic trip prompted by unicorn-human symbiosis, a psuedo-Sackler family bent on converting unicorn parts into lucrative cure-alls, Will Poulter snorting the fabled horse’s horn shavings like they’re cocaine. But as Ortega told ELLE on the red carpet for the film’s SXSW premiere, there was one oddity that stood out to her most: “I just didn’t think I would ever have to cry over Paul Rudd.”
Ortega was alluding, of course, to the end of the film, which sees Ortega’s teenage protagonist, Ridley, mourning the loss of her father, Rudd’s striving workaholic Elliot. Having realized that cozying up to a morally bankrupt pharmaceutical dynasty was less about his daughter’s well-being than his own ambitions and anxieties, Elliot slowly turns on his former employers, the Leopolds (with Richard E. Grant as patriarch Odell, Téa Leoni as mother Belinda, and Poulter as son Shep). Poulter fires on all comedic cylinders as Shep, a hilariously inept nepo baby who believes—even after they’ve killed both his parents—that the unicorns living outside his family’s wilderness compound are essential to his continued relevance. He understands, thanks to Ridley’s research into “The Unicorn Tapestries,” that a pure-of-heart maiden can lure the violent beasts to rest, thus allowing him to tie them up and harvest them for parts.
But just when it seems the two unicorn parents and their baby will fall victim to capitalism, Elliot shows up to rescue them and his pure-of-heart daughter. Finally unafraid to get his hands dirty, he plunges a unicorn horn into Shep’s side. Shep retaliates by stabbing Elliot with an arrow, and the animals themselves retaliate by kicking Shep in the face, killing him in the most brutal slapstick manner imaginable. Having recently lost her mother to illness, Ridley crawls over to Elliot’s body, weeping as her only remaining parent bleeds to death.
But the unicorns like to have the final word when it comes to the living and dying in this movie. With their baby’s horn finally returned to it, thanks to Elliot’s heroism, the parents combine their peculiar powers with those of their offspring. Together, they heal not only the baby, but Elliot, too, whose Lazarus moment involves a cosmic mushroom trip not unlike the one Ridley experienced at the beginning of the film. As Ortega cries over the fractured father-daughter relationship that never had the chance to heal, Rudd peeks into the Great Beyond, only to return to his child in the end.
As The New York Times review of Death of a Unicorn put it, Ortega is “better than she needs to be here,” infusing the film with enough heart to rescue it from entertaining-but-senseless folly. Her tears over Rudd don’t make the project’s middling eat-the-rich commentary any sharper, but they do make the ending pack a stronger punch. Ortega’s believability in the otherwise amped-up, absurdist comedy allows Unicorn to deliver a slight but intact takeaway.
In the final sequence, police officers round up both Elliot and Ridley, seeing as they’re the sole survivors of the Leopold massacre and thus the immediate suspects. But as their police car drives them down the same mountains they ascended to reach the Leopold’s magical creature-infested forests, they realize the unicorn family has followed in their tracks. Soon, the beasts are galloping alongside the cruiser itself, and as one of the unicorns meets Elliot and Ridley’s gaze, it seems clear they’re communicating. Father and daughter both smile and duck their heads. The unicorns then smash into the vehicle, knocking it off the road as the camera cuts to black.
Such a purposefully cheeky ending isn’t meant for theorizing as much as pure comedy, though writer-director Alex Scharfman did confirm to Screen Rant that the unicorns crash the police car with benevolent intent, thanks to their “ongoing, permanent connection” to Elliot and Ridley. Translation: The creatures want to help the father-daughter duo escape prison time, even if that means killing them both and bringing them back to life. The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth might not make much logical sense in Death of a Unicorn, but it does create an emotional touchstone: Elliot and Ridley learn not to fight life’s great mysteries but, instead, to cling to each other in whatever turmoil results. Unlike the Leopolds, they learn there are realities they’re not meant to understand, much less exert control over. By choosing to trust each other—and, by extension, their newfound unicorn pals—they submit to a power greater than themselves. Even if it does come with teeth and horns.
