SXSW debut: Ant-Man Paul Rudd bludgeons baby unicorn in new movie, ‘Death of a Unicorn’
In one of the more shocking (and early) scenes in Paul Rudd’s newest movie, he bashes in the head of a beautiful, dying unicorn with a tire iron.
Ant-Man bludgeons a baby unicorn.
Sorry, boys and girls.
Good thing “Death of a Unicorn” is rated R. This isn’t child’s play.
In Alex Scharfman’s directorial debut, unicorns are dinosaur-huge monsters with “Jaws”-like teeth that spear and disembowel humans with their horns and smash heads like softened pats of butter with their giant hooves.
Think “Jurassic Park” on ketamine.
The comedic horror film from indie filmmaker A24 debuted over the weekend at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Rudd’s fans might be surprised to see the funnyman actor — who spent much of his childhood in Overland Park and co-hosts the annual Big Slick fundraiser for Children’s Mercy — in a gory flick. But it’s not his first horror movie.
In 1995, early in his career, he appeared in “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,” a role considered one of the redeeming qualities of the widely panned flick.
With its “grisly opening sequence, Scharfman, who directed and wrote the screenplay, establishes ‘Death of a Unicorn’ as an absurdist horror and a familiar kind of social satire,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter.
“The studio isn’t by-the-books when it comes to what it releases and the studio’s films can range from incredibly dramatic to incredibly weird,” wrote Screen Rant. “’Death of a Unicorn’ falls into the latter category.
“It’s a fairly wild concept that is paired with even wilder onscreen deaths by unicorns (as though we expected anything less considering the title).”
Rudd, who is wrapping up work on a new “Anaconda” movie in Australia, walked the red carpet at Saturday’s premiere with co-stars Jenna Ortega, Téa Leoni, Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter.
Rudd and Ortega play a father and daughter who accidentally hit a unicorn with their rental car on their way to meet his boss — billionaire pharmaceutical exec Odell Leopold (Grant), who is dying of a terminal illness — at a luxury wilderness reserve retreat in the Canadian Rockies.
Leopold is there with his insensitive wife Belinda (Leoni) and their wise-cracking son Shepard, Poulter’s character who critics have crowned the movie’s scene-stealer.
Investigating the creature lying in the road, Ridley (Ortega) touches its glowing, spiraled horn and has a psychedelic vision of the universe.
But her freaked-out dad, who is late for his meeting, grabs a tire iron and bashes in the creature’s head, splattering both of them with purple unicorn blood.
They shove the creature in the back of the SUV and continue on to the lodge, where it doesn’t take long for everyone to realize the unicorn is not dead.
And, that unicorn blood that splashed Elliot and Ridley has cleared her acne and banished his horrific allergies.
Could it cure cancer, too? Two researchers summoned to the lodge treat their ailing boss with the unicorn’s blood and cure him.
A cure for cancer? Imagine the profits! Ka-ching!
The only one who seems worried about the animal itself is Ridley, a college art major. She opens up her laptop and begins investigating.
She finds information about seven tapestries hanging at The Cloisters in New York City — a real museum — that portray a unicorn hunted by men but tamed by a virgin. Ridley wisely recognizes the warning, that unicorns aren’t all rainbows and sparkles.
Sorry, boys and girls.
And at the point “Death of a Unicorn” becomes a full-on monster movie as the enraged parents of the baby unicorn come looking for it.
But who are the real monsters here? (Spoiler ahead.)
“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,” writes Variety.
At the film festival, Scharfman “had the audience rolling in cycles of uproarious laughter, terrified screams, and triumphant cheers as (spoiler alert, for the thing that happens in this type of movie) the Leopolds are dispatched in outlandishly gory ways.”
In the question-and-answer session after the premiere, Leoni thanked the crowd for cheering and shouted-out the movie’s prop team: “They warmed up the guts for me. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?”
Scharfman has said that as he wrote the screenplay he thought of the Sackler family, well-known patrons of the arts and owners of Purdue Pharma who are largely blamed for the company’s opioid crisis.
“What’s interesting about the Sacklers, more so than the public health crisis they sparked, is the moral bankruptcy of their very lucrative enterprise,” he has said.
“Moving beyond just them, there’s something juicy about pharmaceuticals writ large in our current stage of capitalism — companies in the post-pandemic age treating everything from obesity to COVID, genuinely helping people, but not because they want to better humanity.
“Any social benefit is almost an incidental side effect of strictly a profit-motivated industry and, in fact, the way pricing and patent manipulation work, they’re perversely incentivized to not help as many people as possible. Treating diseases is merely the means: profit is still the ends.”
In the movie, the greedy Odell feasts on a purple unicorn steak and his ex-addict son snorts a line of powdered unicorn horn.
Variety reported that anytime the unicorns killed a Leopold, the SXSW audience erupted into applause, “which just goes to show that a fed-up public continues to view executing pharm-oligarchs as fair payback.
“Scharfman’s script cleverly taps into any number of frustrations swirling in the zeitgeist, using Ortega’s appropriately indignant character to illustrate how enlightened millennials feel ignored and unheard by their elders.”
And, if anyone other than Rudd “were playing her selfish dad,” Variety wrote, “audiences would be actively rooting for the jerk to get ’corned.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 1:43 PM.
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