General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Death of a Unicorn

Death of a Unicorn is a 2025 American horror-comedy film written and directed by Alex Scharfman, in which a father and daughter accidentally kill a unicorn with their car and bring its body to the estate of the father's billionaire pharmaceutical-boss employer, who seeks to exploit the creature's miraculous curative properties.¹ It stars Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E. Grant, and was distributed by A24.¹

Key fact	Detail
Written and directed by	Alex Scharfman, his feature directorial debut¹^•²
Starring	Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E. Grant¹
US release	Wide theatrical release March 28, 2025, in 3,050 theaters³
Box office	$12,519,487 domestic; $16,049,986 worldwide, against a $15,000,000 production budget³
Critical scores	52% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (222 reviews) with a 76% Popcornmeter; Metascore 51 on Metacritic⁴^•⁵
Rating and runtime	Rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use; running time listed as 104 minutes by The Numbers and 1h 47m by A24³^•¹
Home release	Digital release April 29, 2025; began streaming exclusively on Max in the US on July 25, 2025, after a linear HBO debut the same day³^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd), a recently widowed compliance lawyer, drives with his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) to a weekend retreat at the estate of his boss, the terminally ill pharmaceutical billionaire Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), accompanied by Odell's wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and son Shepard (Will Poulter).⁷ On the way, their car hits and kills a unicorn, and they bring the carcass to the mansion.¹ When the creature's healing powers are revealed, curing ailments from acne to cancer, the Leopolds abandon their philanthropic pose for greed, and the company's head of pharmaceutical research (Steve Park) turns the sunporch into a vivisection theater.⁷ More unicorns live in the surrounding woods, they are not the benign creatures of legend, and they come for revenge.⁷^•⁸

The father-daughter rift, strained since the death of Ridley's mother, forms the emotional backbone of the story, and Ridley serves as the film's empathetic center, attuned to the unicorns while every choice around her is driven by money and power.⁹^•¹⁰ Supporting roles include Anthony Carrigan as a put-upon servant and Sunita Mani as a research assistant with mixed feelings about the experiments.⁵^•⁷

Production

Origins. Scharfman, previously an indie producer whose credits include Blow the Man Down and Resurrection, conceived the film from a single imagined opening scene of a father and daughter hitting a unicorn with their car.⁷^•¹¹ He began outlining the script in the fall of 2019 and wrote the father's role specifically for Paul Rudd, reasoning that the actor's inherent likeability would let audiences tolerate a character who makes bad decisions.¹²^•¹⁰ The film was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic and, when production was ready to begin, was delayed by the SAG-AFTRA strikes before the team obtained an interim agreement to proceed.¹³

Unicorn lore and effects. Scharfman researched unicorn mythology extensively, noting that medieval hunt narratives form the archetypical unicorn story and that biblical passages rendered as "unicorn" describe strong beasts, which informed his decision to make the creatures fearsome rather than gentle.¹⁰^•¹³ His unicorns prowl like panthers, with snake-like eyes and talon-like claws, and the film combines CGI creatures with practical elements, including a full puppet built in a prone position for the roadkill scene.¹⁴^•⁸ He cited influences ranging from Jaws, Jurassic Park, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to Succession, Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, Robert Altman's Gosford Park, and Korean cinema.¹⁰^•¹⁵

The film was shot in Hungary and produced by A24 with Ley Line Entertainment, Square Peg, Secret Engine, and other companies.³^•⁵

Release and reception

Death of a Unicorn premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it was announced as part of the festival slate and received its world premiere to a mostly positive reception.¹⁶^•¹⁷ A24 released it wide in the United States on March 28, 2025, followed by limited international releases beginning April 3 in the Netherlands and Russia (CIS), April 4 in the United Kingdom, and April 10 in Australia and Italy.³

Box office. The film opened to $5,787,425, 46.2 percent of its final domestic gross, and finished with $12,519,487 domestically and $16,049,986 worldwide, about 1.1 times its $15 million production budget.³

Critical response. Reviews were mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 52 percent Tomatometer from 222 reviews, with the site's critics consensus crediting Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega's father-daughter rapport while calling the satire broad, and audience scores were warmer at 76 percent on the Popcornmeter.⁴ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 51, based on 40 critic reviews, categorized as mixed or average.⁵ Reviewers singled out Will Poulter's comic performance as the standout, and several critics placed the film in the "eat-the-rich" satirical tradition alongside Alien and Jurassic Park; others, including Ty Burr in The Washington Post, who gave it two stars, found the execution tonally confused and the digital effects unconvincing.¹⁷^•⁵^•⁷

The film received one nomination at the SXSW Film Festival and one at the Sitges-Catalonian International Film Festival, and won once with two nominations at the Golden Trailer Awards.⁵

Home media and streaming

A24 released the film digitally on April 29, 2025, and it began streaming exclusively on Max in the United States on July 25, 2025, after a linear HBO debut the same day.³^•⁶ A special Blu-ray edition is sold through the A24 Shop.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026