Here’s what Death of a Unicorn gets very wrong

‘The unicorn was a Christ-allegory’ and other lies.

Iona Curtius

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth.

A tapestry depicts a unicorn resting within a fenced enclosure.

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries).

Public domain, The Met Museum.

I don’t do horror or gore. And yet, I just saw the gory creature feature comedy horror Death of a Unicorn. I have not seen such a clichéd movie in a very long time (probably since Don’t Look Up…). Death of a Unicorn gives us a strained father-daughter relationship, the artsy young girl with silver rings on every finger and dyed hair, cartoonishly evil rich people, their creepy but stupid blonde son, the put-upon butler… and… the unicorn. However, the biggest cliché of them all is perhaps the desperate attempt to subvert expectations and tell a new story about a familiar trope… and failing.

Given the title of the film, one would be forgiven for assuming that unicorns play a significant role in it. One would be mistaken. The conceit of killer-unicorn is a fun one. I wish the film had played with it more. Instead, the unicorns themselves barely feature and are not particularly interesting or subversive. The perception of the unicorn that is put forward by the characters likewise is trite and tired.

The film features another classic scene: the ‘plucky young woman digs out her laptop and falls down a google rabbit hole to research paranormal/fantastical phenomenon’. In her research Ridley comes across a set of medieval tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt. These tapestries do exist in real life and are indeed now housed at The Met. The Met’s fictional website in the film informs Ridley that the fifth tapestry in the series ‘The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden’ only survives in fragments (true) and that scholars believe the missing part of the tapestry most likely showed the unicorn going on a murderous rampage (very much not true). From this, Ridley deduces that, since unicorns do indeed appear to be real, the warnings of old ought to be heeded. In the film, Ridley is proved right, the unicorns do turn out to be murderous monsters out for the blood of those who would abuse the remains of their dead foal.

While the real Met website does indeed show us the torn tapestry, it features no such conjecture about the gory violence the unicorn might have inflicted prior to being subdued by the maiden.

In one of her desperate attempts to reason with the megalomaniacal pharmaceutical tycoons, Ridley slips in a sentence about the unicorn serving as an allegory for Christ. This is a claim that is repeated all across the internet in various fora, fan sites, even some old scholarship. But that is exactly what this theory is: outdated scholarship… mixed with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of paternalistic attitudes towards the past and half-misremembered folklore about Christian symbolism. It is true that medieval art is rich in symbolism. It is also true that medieval European cultures were deeply steeped in Christian religious traditions. However, as Barbara Drake Boehm writes in her recent book on the tapestries ‘the Cloisters Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries have … fallen victim to a tendency to perceive Christianity in every stitch’. The fact that one of the hunters has a scabbard that invokes the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (the Virgin Mary), or that another carries rosary beads, are most likely simply indicative of the fact these were common items ‘within the majority-Christian society in which the tapestries were created’. (A Blessing of Unicorns, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020).

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past.

One doesn’t need a degree in art history to figure out that such an allegorical relation would make no sense either. If the unicorn was representative of Christ and the hunt of his Passion, why does the unicorn fight back? If the untouched maiden in whose lap the unicorn reposes is the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, why does she help the hunters trap and kill the unicorn? The tapestry that supposedly shows the unicorn resurrected and at peace in its captivity does not even appear to belong to the same narrative as the other tapestries. And why would a resurrected Christ-figure be shown in supposed captivity?

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past. ‘Ah, well, back then they were all religious fanatics that believed in silly things like Jesus and unicorns.’ The implication being that in our modern, enlightened state we couldn’t possibly be accused of believing in silly simplistic mythical accounts of the world… Yeah. Not only is this of course false, it also distract from the very real things we could learn from the past.

The film in the end wants to have it both ways. It wants to ridicule medieval people (based on lazy stereotypes) as well as perpetuating some of the most backward attitudes woven into the tapestries. So, what is the real true meaning of the tapestries and of unicorns? I don’t know. I can’t offer ‘real true’ interpretations (because they don’t exist). What I can offer is a careful and close engagement.

What strikes me about the myth of the unicorn is what the unicorn does stand for. Over the centuries the unicorn has been used as a symbol for purity, innocence, humility, and sometimes fertility. In medieval poetry the (male) bard would often cast himself as the unicorn, beguiled by his beautiful lady, desiring nothing more than to rest his head in her lap. Little of this particular metaphor has survived into the modern pop-culture. What seems to have survived is the strong connection with young virgins. This particular trope features heavily in the film too though the film makers attempt to gloss over the sexual implications of ‘virgin’ by speaking only of ‘maidens’ (which still means the same thing but doesn’t have the same sexual baggage for modern ears).

Now, that is indeed an interesting aspect worth unpacking. Why is it that unicorns are so attracted to young women who have not had sex? Why the obsession with virginity and the implied association that – for a woman! – having sex sullies something pure? What does it mean that both the hunters in the tapestries and the rich people in the film use a woman’s body and sexuality to trap the unicorn and commit their violence? Where’s the film that deals with those questions? Until they make that one maybe I’ll stick with My Little Pony, I’m told that has significantly less disembowelment.

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10 November 2025

5 min read

Stillness is not always peace: how wellness and illness intertwine in silence

Stillness invites clinical insight—and a deeper kind of presence

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

Celine Dion, stiff-person syndrome sufferer.

Celine Dion.

The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health. It includes rest and rejuvenation, through mindfulness, meditation and sleep. As a care home nurse, I am intrigued by the subject of stillness – for patient and nurse - in the pursuit of wellness, and as a sign of illness.

There’s a lot of stillness in illness - from the dense paralysis that can follow stroke or spinal cord injury, to the subtle weakness or stiffness in an arm that might signal the onset of motor neurone disease. Over half of people with Parkinson’s experience ‘freezing’, feeling as if their feet are momentarily glued to the ground. Freezing is also a feature of stiff-person syndrome – the auto-immune neurological condition powerfully documented by Celine Dion in her film I Am. In so-called stone-man syndrome, muscle tissue is replaced by bone, an immobile ‘second skeleton’.

The stillest still is seen in death itself. I’ve stood still with spouses and sons as their loved ones breathe their last. Alone, I’ve watched the hush between heartbeats until there exists only stillness beside sorrow. It’s a stillness like no other, when breath becomes still air, and the only movement is through a window opened to let air in, and souls out, in time-honoured nursing tradition.

In memory of babies born still, a public education and awareness campaign has been launched in the US. “Stillness is an illness” calls for families and healthcare providers to take seriously altered foetal movement in pregnancy, which is reported by 50 per cent of mothers who experience stillbirth. Stillbirth is a tragedy insufficiently addressed in global agendas, policies, and funded programmes, according to the World Health Organization. Mothers in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia are at highest risk, with nearly 1.5 million stillbirths in these regions in 2021.

Sometimes stillness manifests in more muted ways. When dementia robs the recall of person, place and time, residents no longer lift their head in response to their name, nor appear at their chosen place at the breakfast table in the morning. Television presenter Fiona Phillips describes the late stages of dementia for her mother, when she “spent whole chunks of time just sitting and staring ahead, only able to give out a series of sounds.” In care home nursing, I have brought stillness to an agitated mind. Therapeutic touch has relieved tension; creative activities have reduced restless pacing up and down. Music, movement, and medication can also calm a troubled mind.

In the further pursuit of patient wellness, the nurse may need to be still. The “CAREFUL” observation tool has been developed in nursing homes, in which the nurse sits still and discreetly watches a resident for a period of time, assessing their activities and interactions, working out what brings wellbeing, or ill-being, for that individual; residents in this case being our best teachers. Other times in dementia care, the nurse is still as they patiently wait for a resident to explore, enquiring into self-made mysteries solvable only by themselves, examining everything from door handles to another resident’s buttons; or to slowly finish a meal, their swallow also affected by the disease.

Punctuating any frantic nursing shift are other moments of necessary stillness as the nurse performs intricate procedures, carefully inserting catheters, delicately taking blood from fragile veins, or applying prolonged pressure to stem bleeding caused by a catheter during cardiac stenting. In the operating theatre, the scrub nurse stands still awaiting a surgeon’s call; the “honor walk” or walk of respect is a ceremonial procession in which healthcare staff line the corridor, in silent tribute, as a brain-dead patient is taken to theatre for organ donation.

There’s a different stillness sought in nursing, and elsewhere, which runs very deep. Described by missionary and author Elisabeth Elliot as a “perfect stillness…a great gift”, it is, in her words, “not superficial, a mere absence of fidgeting or talking. It is a deliberate and quiet attentiveness—receptive, alert, ready”. It’s an expectant stillness in which we “put ourselves firmly and determinedly in God’s presence, saying ‘I’m here, Lord. I’m listening’.” Writing for the Christian Medical Fellowship, nurse Sherin describes such a seeking during a stressful shift. “Overwhelmed, I stepped away to find a quiet place. I ended up in a washroom. It wasn’t ideal, but there I cried out to God, asking for courage, peace, patience, and above all, love for that patient.” And her prayer was answered. “That, to me, was the quiet, powerful presence of Christ,” she writes.

Her role model was Jesus himself who often stepped away to be still, to seek spiritual sustenance. Just before he fed the five thousand, Jesus said to his tired and hungry disciples, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” When grieving the execution of John the Baptist, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place; and in the hours before his arrest, Jesus withdrew about a stone’s throw from his disciples, knelt down and prayed. An angel from heaven appeared to him, and strengthened him. We too are invited, in the book of Psalms, to “Be still and know God” when hard pressed and weary. Here, the words “be still” derive from the Hebrew rapha which means “to be weak, to let go, to release”, or simply to surrender. It’s a theme repeated in many of the great Christian hymns, hinting at an expectant, sustaining stillness, invoking God’s promise of His presence in that stillness. Little-known hymnwriter Katharina von Schlegel, writing in the eighteenth century, captures it perfectly.

Be still, my soul! the Lord is on your side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to your God to order and provide;
In ev'ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul! your best, your heav’nly friend
Thru' thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

I’ve sought this stillness, and it’s brought me wellness. It’s the reason why, despite some difficult days, I am a nurse. Still.

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