We may be witnessing the last dying gasp of the “eat the rich” genre. Social satire that skewers the ruling class has been around as long as there has been civilization, but the genre has been running rampant in Hollywood for the past decade, enjoying an all-time peak with the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019. But as we’re seeing more movies trying to mine every metaphor out of “eat the rich” satire as they can — from The Menu, to Blink Twice and the upcoming Opus — you start to see the slowly diminishing returns. And that’s a downturn that’s deeply felt in the latest movie in the genre: Death of a Unicorn.
Alex Scharfman’s so-edgy-it-hurts horror-comedy was met with a baffling amount of cheers and laughs during its buzzy premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, which I can only say was a result of the kind of groupthink that Death of a Unicorn was satirizing. But all the oohs at the very heavy-handed digs at the ultra-wealthy, and the gasps at the sudden shocks of gore, I only found perplexing — there’s nothing Death of a Unicorn was saying that hasn’t been said before. And what it did have to say, it repeated until its punchline was bled dry. Admittedly, there is a certain novelty to Death of a Unicorn’s premise but anything fresh about the film is undercut by the film’s dogged insistence that its comedy and satire is on the cutting edge.
