The indie distributor and studio A24 still handles plenty of movies with a small scale and a delicate release pattern, like this summer’s acclaimed Sorry, Baby, which just expanded into a few hundred theaters after a few weeks of much more limited play. But more A24 movies than ever are opening wide, in a thousand or more theaters, right away – and currently see their streaming afterlife play out on HBO Max, giving them another round of exposure even if their theatrical releases tank. That’s more or less the case with a pair of thematically similar A24 productions currently occupying the upper tier of the HBO Max charts: Opus and Death of a Unicorn, which flopped in theaters weeks apart earlier this spring.
The decision to these movies out near-simultaneously was a strange one for the usually savvy studio. They both feature young women played by a buzzy and already-beloved stars – Ayo Edebiri in Opus; Jenna Ortega in Unicorn – visiting a remote location to interact with rich people whose cloistered privilege feels foreign to them, before it becomes downright menacing. They’re both horror thrillers of sorts, both laced with dark comedy and satire, that you could accuse of self-consciously courting cult appreciation.
In the case of Opus, the movie itself is about a cult, a figurative one around legendary pop musician Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) that turns out to be a real one, as discovered by Ariel (Edebiri), a young journalist still looking for her big breakthrough. Along with other select journalists and critics, Ariel visits Moretti’s remote compound for a listening party where he will debut his new album, and finds herself increasingly unnerved by the behavior of the star, his staff, and even her sycophantic fellow writers.
The one-sane-woman narrative also drives Death of a Unicorn, where Ridley (Jenna Ortega) and her father Elliot (Paul Rudd) are on their way to visit the woodsy estate of Elliot’s boss when they accidentally hit a unicorn with their car. In a panic, Elliot finishes the creature off and loads it into their car, only to discover that the creature’s physiology somehow has healing powers – which the rich family they’re visiting immediately plans to exploit for both their own physical gain and for broader profit.
Both movies feel like descendants (in terms of marketing, if not necessarily their actual writing and production) of The Menu, a Fox Searchlight hit that seemed like an attempt to make their own stylish A24 horror-satire – or maybe it just feels like that in retrospect, now that A24 has made a couple of de facto knockoffs conforming to that reputation. Indeed, the weird thing about Death of a Unicorn and Opus is how much they do feel like another studio convinced they can bottle the A24 magic, their similarities almost functioning as a sly wink at the idea of a particular indie studio exerting real authorship over its small-scale, filmmaker-driven projects.
It’s important, then, to note that both movies are disappointing on their own terms. Though they’re not especially close in tone – Opus is like a less obtuse, more overtly comic Ari Aster movie, while Unicorn is broader still, as well as more arch, with a creature-feature component – they do have similar strengths. Both movies have funny moments, and their lead actresses have the desired effect of selling the audience on a figure of identification. This flatters the audience a little, too; who wouldn’t want to feel as cool as Edebiri or Ortega, using rich and famous people to tell us that we’re correct to be suspicious of other rich and/or famous people? To be fair, the movies do acknowledge complicity; Rudd’s Elliot is obsequious to his powerful boss, in hopes of securing a strong financial future for his daughter, while Ariel yearns for a chance to put herself in her work. Again, relatable stuff.
Given the talent involved and the hooky genre elements, neither is a bad choice for a streaming watch. Yet there’s something prefabricated about both films and their belated am-I-right elbows to the ribs. Mark Anthony Green, a former journalist himself, surely knows the milieu of Opus, but the cultiness of the in-movie fandom never seems particularly connected to anything that’s gone on in the music business in the 21st century. (How does a movie about cultish devotion to a music star evoke Prince or David Bowie more readily than Taylor Swift?) Death of a Unicorn, meanwhile, makes its wealthy buffoons so pompous and dimwitted that it misses the ego-driven hubris of the super-rich, the way they come to believe their dumb luck is actually business savvy or, worse, worldly insight. The family in Unicorn just feels like old money – borderline ancient.
These problems obviously fall to the filmmakers more than the studio. But it’s still jarring to see these also-rans emerge from a place of such impeccable contemporary branding. To some extent, A24 is, along with Neon, a studio that’s managed to emerge from the potentially cinema-killing pandemic in an unusual position for growth. The studio had plenty of cache before 2020, but they’ve since emerged as both awards and box office players; six of the studio’s ten biggest grossers come from the past three years alone. To some extent, movies like these two are the inevitable byproduct of that growth; they’re going to release more mainstream movies, more frequently. It’s not like either of these are as cheaply insubstantial as last fall’s The Front Room (and, for that matter, A24 has always released some off-band stuff like Equals or seeming self-imitators like Lamb).
It does, however, see the studio lose a step in the horror genre, where it had many of its earliest successes. Some of their big horror names have moved on to other areas (like Ari Aster, whose current Eddington is a hard-to-classify 2020-set movie) or other studios (like Robert Eggers, whose Nosferatu was a big hit for Focus). It’s hard for Death of a Unicorn or Opus to measure up, and their eat-the-rich underpinnings can’t help but feel like a poor substitute, like an attempt to back-solve a temporary house style. Talking about a studio as if they’re the author of these movies does the filmmakers a disservice, yes, but it also feels like part of the game plan – like two pieces of A24 merch are being A/B tested on their own moneyed cult.
Stream Death of a Unicorn on HBO Max