While driving my nieces home from their flag football practice, my oldest announced that she wanted to see The Woman in the Yard.  Because I view a lot of movies and their trailers, I happened to know this is a horror flick.  My youngest streamed the preview on her phone while I tried to recall the film I was to see after I dropped them off with their parents. Despite my lack of memory, I think I might have caught a few seconds of a clip from Death of a Unicorn, as I finally recalled the name.  When the trailer was played, my nieces agreed that it was a scary movie.  This is not my usual choice.  However, it has Paul Rudd in it and an intriguing title.  How bad could it be?  You will have to read on to find out.

What Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) is finding out in Death of a Unicorn is just how damaged is his relationship with Ridley Kintner (Jenna Ortega), his college aged daughter.  They have come to Alaska as a father-daughter/work trip, trying to regain some of the lost connection from when her mom passed away.  As a lawyer, he has been summoned to the northern reaches of North America to close a deal to become the personal attorney for a wealthy family.  As he wrestles with the lack of global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking, and the concomitant poor cell service, he begins to inadvertently speed on the lonely mountain roads.  In other words, he is distracted, too much so to notice the animal standing in the middle of the thoroughfare.  The Kintner’s rental car hits the creature, and they get out to investigate.  What they find defies belief.  On the asphalt before them, bleeding and barely clinging to life is a small unicorn.  Ridley makes eye contact with it, being drawn to it somehow before reaching out and grasping its horn.  Upon doing so, she has a kind of psychedelic experience that sees her being transported through space towards a golden cone of light.  The vision comes to an abrupt end when Elliot finishes the creature off by bashing in its head with a tire iron.  From there, the next stop is the palatial Leopold estate.  Ridley is still creeped out by what they had experienced during their trip, but Elliot pushes ahead with finalizing the deal with Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant).  He is Elliot’s would-be boss, or he would be if he signs the contract instead of philosophizing about it.  They are all of the arrogant strain of the noblesse oblige class of wealth, comedically ignorant of how snooty they sound.  As such, they ignore Ridley’s increasingly strident warnings that her and her father need to leave, including Elliot, until banging and rustling erupts from their rental car.  Apparently, the Kintners had brought the unicorn corpse with them, intending to bury it when they had a chance.  The resulting chaos is cut short when the Leopold’s head of security, Shaw (Jessica Hynes), shoots the animal in the head.  At first, the Leopolds are repulsed until Elliot reveals that his allergies have disappeared and he no longer needs glasses, and that Ridley’s acne has cleared up.  They both came into contact with the unicorn corpse.  Because Odell is within days of dying, the Leopolds immediately swing into action, bringing in a team of doctors and scientists to analyze their new discovery.  With some poking and prodding of the Kintners, they learn of the horned horses’ healing properties.  Thus, they decide to immediately go ahead and infuse some unicorn blood into Odell’s intravenous (IV) drip.  When he makes a full recovery, they claim they have a cure for cancer.  The only person not impressed is Ridley, who does extra research when looking at pictures of her mom reveals the famous “Hunt of the Unicorn” tapestries.  If you have seen any of the Harry Potter films, you have probably noticed these works of art.  According to Death of a Unicorn, they tell of the dangers of trying to kill or keep unicorns.  What she comes to believe is that the right course of action is to leave the smaller unicorn outside for its parents, and nothing bad will come of it.  The idea seems to have some credence when the scientists note that the horn looks to be repairing the larger body, meaning it will soon resurrect.  Instead, Odell decides they are going to vacuum seal the supposedly dead one and fly it back to his corporate headquarters for further testing.  In the middle of taking it out to a moving van, the dead unicorn’s parents attack.  The Leopold’s security team manages to wound one of them, after which Odell decides to go hunting, forcing Elliot to accompany if he wants his lucrative job.  Ridley stays behind with Odell’s son, Shepard Leopold (Will Poulter), who is now snorting ground up unicorn powder and conjuring increasingly crazy ideas as to what should be done.  As you can probably predict, the hunting party does not go well, and Elliot and Odell barely make it back alive.  Odell is killed shortly thereafter, and from there it is a matter of surviving a night of being stalked by mythical creatures out to avenge the harm caused to their youngling.  Come morning, it is down to the Kintners and Shepard, who is fixated on herding the unicorns and reaping their resources.  He succeeds in tying up the adults, who are spiritually connected to Ridley and lie down at her feet.  However, before the lunatic can do anymore harm, Elliot stabs Shepard, but is mortally wounded in return.  It is the unicorns that finish off Shepard.  In exchange for their help, the adult unicorns use their powers to resurrect Elliot and their foal.  As the film ends, the reunited family helps the Kintners escape from police custody.

The Kintners end up in the back of a police car at the conclusion of Death of a Unicorn because the Leopolds underappreciated butler, Griff (Anthony Carrigan), sensibly summons the authorities.  Unfortunately, they arrived to find a father and daughter covered in blood in a house full of dead bodies.  Would you believe them if they told you that it was not them but unicorns?  With these few sentences, I think you can get a sense of the horror-comedy dynamic that makes for a tricky analysis by a Catholic reviewer.  Most of the time I avoid scary films because a lot of them are demonic in nature.  It is not only their evil character, but the fact that evil often appears to win that keeps me from seeing them.  This directly contradicts Faith.  We know that it is love, God in other words, that ultimately triumphs.  Bad things can happen, but they do not have the final say, as horror movies suggest.  What tempers my judgment of this one are the comedy and fantasy elements.  Horror takes itself seriously, which is another reason why I find them difficult to watch as Catholic.  However, by introducing fantasy, it makes the proceedings less believable, if that makes any sense?  I must confess that the title had me intrigued on this note because there are some out there that want to believe unicorns are real.  That is the real fantasy.  Finally, making it a comedy adds levity to otherwise tricky situations.  God has a sense of humor, and knowing this helps, even when watching movies.

It was because I thought Death of a Unicorn would have a sense of humor that I decided to see it, even after what my niece’s reported to me.  Again, with Rudd being in it, I figured it could not be too evil, and I was right.  It is his character, though, that I would like to here focus my Catholic energies.  For most of the movie, he appears as an unsympathetic person.  In other words, he does not act as one would expect of the ideal Christian father.  He is constantly putting his career over Ridley instead of listening to her warnings.  We later learn there is a reason for his behavior.  Before his wife died, he had promised her that he would do everything he could to make their daughter’s life comfortable.  From this perspective, he is fulfilling the kinds of vows every man makes before God on the day he is married, to serve his family and to love them like he would himself.  However, he is not looking on his activities at the Leopolds house in the proper light.  There is a telling moment when he accidentally admits that his career comes first in his life.  Ultimately, we can trace this back to the promise he made, but in the moment it sounds bad.  What cements him as a sympathetic character is when he is willing to lay down his life for Ridley.  One of the unicorns is about to break into their room, and he gets her outside to give her a chance to run away while he distracts the beast.  Of course, this hearkens back to John 15:13 when we are told there is no greater love than to be willing to sacrifice oneself for another.  The significance does not change when it is family or friend.

The significance of Death of a Unicorn is its uniqueness.  There are moments I do not love, such as the apparent drug use.  That is something I am always uncomfortable with, even when it is supposed to be funny.  I also do not appreciate when Ridley makes the false claim that Christian religious art was produced as a tool of control.  Still, if you can get past these elements, as well as some swearing, and gore, then you have something that is, to say the least, different.