Death of a Unicorn skillfully blends comedy, horror, and fantasy, and nowhere more so than in its rollicking final scene, which tosses in one final swerve before the credits roll. So when Polygon had the opportunity to sit down with writer-director Alex Scharfman, we had to ask about the film’s, um… let’s say “open” ending.
[Ed. note: This piece contains end spoilers for Death of a Unicorn.]
To describe events with a minimum of detail: At the end of Death of a Unicorn, after a pair of unicorns get bloody revenge on some people who deserve it, dad and daughter duo Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) wind up in the back of a police car. As the car pulls away on the same beautiful trip through picturesque wooded peaks that Elliot and Ridley made at the movie’s start, the two notice that the unicorn family is keeping pace with the vehicle, running swiftly, majestically, and free through the forest. The officer warns Elliot and Ridley that they’ll want to get a good attorney, and they share a private smirk, because Elliot is a top corporate lawyer.
Another movie might have left it there, but Unicorn swings back into fantasy (and maybe comedy?) mode with swift violence: Elliot locks eyes with the dad unicorn, receiving an unspoken psychic message, and then — after a pause for Elliot and Ridley to buckle up — the unicorns ram that police car right off the road. Cut to credits!
I thought the vibes on this ending were impeccable, but I could understand how it would seem out of left field to someone else. So I asked Scharfman: Does he have thoughts about where Ridley and Elliot are now? Or was the open-endedness the point? And… did those unicorns just kill a cop?
“Strictly from a plot perspective,” Scharfman said, the purpose of the ending was to communicate that “these unicorns now have this bond with Ridley and Elliot that will last Ridley and Elliot’s entire lives. They have this cosmic connection to these unicorns. They’ve touched the source, and they’ve seen something that they will never unsee, and they’re now permanently enlightened as a result.”
Emotionally, he added, he wanted to make sure the movie had a triumphant moment of classic unicorn iconography, one that didn’t really fit into the monster-movie role the unicorns played for the rest of Death of a Unicorn’s run time.
“Throughout so much of the movie,” Scharfman said, we only get to see the unicorns “in a very contained way. We see them standing still, or prowling, or breaking into the house, or killing people, but we don’t see them in nature, running, in daylight, just wild. This is a beautiful wild creature. […] I wanted to [satisfy that genre convention for] the audience, because I think that’s what we all go into a unicorn movie hoping that we’re secretly going to get.”
But thematically, Scharfman said, the scene was also carefully calculated to combine all of Death of a Unicorn’s divergent genres and tones into one final blowout.
“By the end, as the movie progresses, we are moving into a more emotional register. The comedy has come down, the horror has had a peak and also come down, and now we’re in this cathartic place of emotional resolution — I hope. But I thought the last action of the movie should be this violent return to like, Oh no, this is what the movie was. Remember. […] You want to remind people, No, no, no, we’re still in that angry unicorn movie. We can hold two ideas in our head at the same time.”
Scharfman said it felt appropriate to him that the movie should end on the unicorns committing one final act of extreme violence, according to their own sense of righteous but inflexible morality — which has, by this point, been well and bloodily established.
“They don’t know what a cop is,” he said. “They just know, Oh, that person has taken our friends hostage, and so let’s set them free now. I think there’s something about that that’s fun, but I do like the idea of them — in the same way that they’re upsetting the social order throughout the film — I do, I don’t know, yeah. I do like the idea of them [laughs] doing violence onto a police officer for perceived injustices.”
Death of a Unicorn is in theaters now.
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