Film reviews: Death of a Unicorn | Four Mothers | Mr Burton

After a promising start, Death of a Unicorn descends into standard monster movie territory, writes Alistair Harkness

Death of a Unicorn (15) ★★

Four Mothers (15) ★★

Mr Burton (12A) ★★★

Death of a Unicorn would be a good title for a film about the failure of a WeWork-style billion-dollar start-up, but in the case of this A24-produced hipster horror comedy from debut writer/director Alex Sharfman, it’s meant more literally. En route to the private nature-reserve-set retreat of an uber-wealthy Big Pharma clan, corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his estranged college-aged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) hit a unicorn foal with their rental car and stuff the thought-to-be dead creature in the boot. Though Elliot has already attempted to put the beast out of its misery with a tyre iron, their hosts — terminally ill patriarch Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant), his pathologically glib wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and their dangerously feckless son Shep (Will Poulter) — want to exploit the unicorn corpse for all it’s worth after realising its blood and still-glowing horn have healing properties.

Death of a Unicorn | Contributed

The film has some fun for a while, gleefully exploring their mercenary nature. The Leopolds want to monetise this miracle cure-all for the betterment of the global elites and the film uses this to offer up some blunt, but still pretty funny, satirical digs at the super-rich. The problem here is that not only has our daily reality rendered much of what the film is poking fun at beyond parody, the eat-the-rich premise the film is setting up is already well-trodden material (see Triangle of Sadness, The Menu and Glass Onion for a few recent examples).

This in itself would be okay if Sharfman had a better sense of where to take the story. Alas, from the moment he layers in some convoluted unicorn mythology, the film descends into standard monster movie territory with a plot twist straight out of Jurassic Park: The Lost World and many more tongue-in-cheek nods to Alien. Not that Sharfman is trying to hide his influences. Indeed, he pays tribute to Steven Spielberg by having Elliot and Ridley share a surname with one of the shark’s victims in Jaws and names Ortega’s character after Ridley Scott, who’s made two films featuring unicorns (Blade Runner and Legend), as well as the aforementioned Alien. But this kind of self-awareness is cutesy rather than clever and the film is similarly blithe about the emotional stakes for the characters, with the father-daughter conflict between Rudd and Ortega (both doing heroic work with limited material) too easily resolved to really mean much. In the end there’s something almost algorithmic about Death of a Unicorn’s bid for instant cult status. The literalness of its title serves as its own warning.

Four Mothers | Courtesy BFI Distribution

Italian filmmaker Gianni Di Gregorio’s deft and delightful 2008 charmer Mid-August Lunch gets a broad and sentimental remake courtesy of Four Mothers, a film that retains the basic premise of the original, but transposes the action from Rome to Dublin and makes the main character, Edward, much younger. Played by Glasgow-born James McArdle, he’s now a gay Irish novelist whose life as a debut writer on the cusp of a Sally Rooney-style literary breakthrough in America is complicated by the fact he’s also the primary caregiver for his elderly mother, Alma (Fionnula Flanagan).

Edward’s American publishers need him to come to America for a two-week book tour, but his reluctance to put Alma temporarily in care suggests that he’s also using her as a bit of a crutch to avoid having to engage with the world — something his coupled-up best friends, then his therapist, soon take advantage of when they dump their mothers at his house so they can jet off to the Canary Islands for a winter Pride event. That’s already way more plot than the original film deemed necessary and, even at a briskly paced 90 minutes, this feels a bit bloated. McArdle, though, demonstrates his leading man potential.

Harry Lawtey as Richard Burton in Mr Burton | Warren Orchard / Courtesy of Icon Film Distribution

Speaking of which, Harry Lawtey, star of TV’s Industry, gets a sly showcase for his movie star bona fides in Mr Burton, a Richard Burton origins story detailing the Welsh acting legend’s formative relationship with the school teacher, Philip Burton, who not only fostered his love of drama, but donated his surname to help him progress his career (the actor was born Richard Jenkins).

The elder Burton is nicely played by Toby Jones and, though the film is a fairly run-of-the-mill early-years biopic that can’t quite hide the 28-year-old Lawtey’s inability to play a Welsh school boy convincingly, when it does eventually skip ahead to his first audition as “Richard Burton”, Lawtey’s transformation is startling. It’s not just that he nails the voice, which he does, it’s that his ability to suddenly tap into that ineffable star quality that can’t be faked suddenly brings this intentionally glum film to life. Forget Burton, this feels like Lawtey doing a straight-up audition for a certain British secret agent soon to be recast.

All films in cinemas from 4 April