Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Comedy-horror fantasy Death of a Unicorn is a high-concept movie par excellence, with one simple central idea pushed to the limit. What if unicorns were real — and not gentle benign beasts but rampaging monsters, lethally destructive in horn and hoof?Debut writer-director Alex Scharfman builds up this premise on a base of broad but piquant satire. Paul Rudd plays Elliot, an attorney driving through the nature reserve founded by his immensely wealthy boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant); en route, he carelessly runs over a unicorn but keeps the incident a secret from the Leopold family for fear of damaging his career prospects.What follows is an adept juggling of action, grand guignol and absurdist farce that mainly pays off because of a strong cast and smart scripting — the odd one-liner as sharp as those horns, which resemble highly crafted zombie knives. Grant starts out playing a languorously incapacitated patriarch; then, as his character is suddenly rejuvenated, he too recaptures some of the deranged fire of his Withnail and I prime — very enjoyably, and under a preposterous safari hat. Téa Leoni is the supremely brittle Mrs Leopold and, as their spoiled scion, Will Poulter works those singular eyebrows and nostrils to full effect.Best of all is Rudd, a master at playing the likeable nebbish, which he does here with a rubbery slump to his shoulders, which says more than words can. He transcends the overall cartoonishness as a sympathetic but inescapably abject apparatchik who cedes to abusive authority partly because it’s his nature, partly to guarantee a future for his daughter — Jenna Ortega (Wednesday, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), again likeably working her moody teen routine.Death of a Unicorn offers a light menu of macabre pleasures — sometimes too obvious, occasionally a touch too mystical to be entirely palatable. But the gougings are delivered expertly. ★★★☆☆In cinemas from April 4
