Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn sees the billionaire satires of recent years tip over into eco-horror. Even though these films have become somewhat rote, I still have a soft spot for them due to their exquisite sense of spatial intrigue. Nearly always they focus on an outsider, or group of outsiders, encountering a space that has been sequestered by the ultra-rich. In this case father and daughter Elliot and Ridley Kintner (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) are spending a weekend with the plutocratic company that run the pharmaceutical firm where Elliot works as “money launderer for the oligarchy” – patriarch Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and his son Shepard (Will Poulter). This retreat is taking place in the middle of an enormous wilderness region that Odell has protected in a gesture of corporate rewilding. The only catch is that Elliot accidentally hits a unicorn along the way. When the Leopolds discover he is concealing the unicorn in his trunk, and that its horn seems capable of curing all human diseases, they set about to profit from it.

When we meet him, Odell is in the final stages (perhaps the final days) of cancer so his first thought is of how he can harvest the unicorn to keep himself alive longer. The unicorn’s organs do indeed remove his cancer entirely, even as the death of the creature seems to have sent a destructive ripple through the natural world. We see the life of the planet set against the life of an aging billionaire who, despite his conservation philanthropy, is terrified at the thought of being a mere facet of nature. Odell tells Elliot about a Flilipino tribe who nominate a tree to be buried in when they die, fearing that without the unicorn “that may be my last act.” His goal, before the unicorn, was to be preserved in a cryogenic chamber, and his only regret was that he couldn’t separate himself from the natural world entirely by travelling into outer space.

As an undead billionaire preying on the environment, Odell naturally takes most of the unicorn for himself – eating unicorn steak, ingesting powdered horn, and hooking himself up to its purple blood while exclaiming “I’ve never been so alive!” Still, there is just enough unicorn left for a small group of consumers, and so Odell and Belinda set out to write a shortlist of the hyper-elites who will benefit from its restorative powers. Elliot compares it to an NFT: “It’s going to help a lot of people – well, not a lot of people.” The Leopolds thus envisage themselves as the heads of an immortal billionaire class: “We’re going to live forever!”

Interestingly, the unicorn itself is not a particularly benign creature. At first it seems to personify nature in a somewhat sentimental manner. However, over time, it becomes more alien. For one thing, it appears to slip in and out of life. For another, it generates a broader cataclysmic event, starting with eerie ambient sounds from the surrounding forest and an escalating purple borealis over the mountains. Its complexity soon extends beyond that of the technology that Odell and his team harness to contain it. As its horn begins to emit electromagnetic radiation, other unicorns approach the house, turning off electricity and cell reception with their horns. When the humans don night goggles, the purple-tinted images pale in comparison to the unicorns’ own violet-tinted perception, which transcends time and space.

By the third act the unicorns have come to embody the profound otherness of nature. During these scenes Scharfman draws directly on the Alien xenomorph, whether it’s the humans huddling over a motion sensor machine, trying to figure out why the unicorns seem to right on top of them, or Ridley (the similarity to Ripley seems intentional) gazing into the alpha patriarch’s monstrous jaws in a homage to Alien 3. And this becomes the final note of Death of a Unicorn – a promise that nature is ultimately more complex, brutal and indifferent than even the most callous billionaire and will effect its revenge soon and sure enough. It’s a peculiarly sombre ending for a film that starts in a more recognizable “eat the rich” satirical mode and Scharfman doesn’t quite pull it off, opting for a final conflation of sentimentality and horror that closes things on a starkly atonal note. Yet that atonality, the way things don’t fully come together, is also part of what makes Death of a Unicorn interesting, caught as it is between several urgent warnings for the future.