Unicorn Store (2019)

She’s got paint on her face!
She’s unorthodox and creative!
She’s a pixie-cut away from being the bog-standard ‘manic pixie dream girl’!
She’s Kit!

That’s not short for something, not even something nauseatingly independent like “Kitryna.”
It’s just “Kit.”
It’s boring and stupid, like her character.

The movie opens with Kit (Brie Larson) painting in an art class. Her peers are standing next to carefully framed and hanged paintings, each of them wearing dark, business-casual attire.
Kit, meanwhile, is wearing coveralls, converses, a backwards baseball cap, has somehow managed to almost completely drench herself in paint, and has color-coated the entire section of wall around her painting.
She fails the class and I can’t blame the teacher - given the context of the room she was in, she willingly and aggressively missed the point of that assignment.
But it’s okay, because she’s a free spirit. 

She’s a unicorn.

Yep. That’s it. That’s the theme.
She stands out and refuses to conform!
Or something.
That’s pretty much as deep as the movie gets. 

We, the audience, are supposed to believe that Kit is a college student. Her age is never identified in any way, thus I’m defaulting to thinking she’s supposed to be the standard 18-22 year group. Unfortunately for Larson, she looks like a completely grown adult woman, and no number of button-covered denim jackets or pigtails help her look any younger.

Kit’s failure in one art class was apparently the last straw, and she drops out of college to go live at home again, where her parents badger her about trying something new.

Joan Cusack plays Kit’s mother in the exact air-headed ditz role she had in the TV show “Shameless.” It wasn’t fun there and it isn’t fun here. It’s the kind of constant, idiotic obliviousness that makes you wonder how she manages to put her pants on in the morning.
Bradley Whitford plays the father, who is only slightly more competent.

Kit goes for a temp job via an agency and is given a bunch of monkey work at an ad company, whereupon Gary, the VP, decides to start making incredibly uncomfortable advances on her.
I spent the first half of the movie trying to decide if it was supposed to be a joke, like the writers were going for some kind of dry, dark comedy thing with him.
Maybe they were, but if so, they failed hard. Gary was just straight-up creepy, at one point outright saying “so, tell me about the lingerie” to Kit, surrounded by other co-workers, in a meeting about selling advertising for a vacuum. In the #metoo era, and releasing immediately after the girl-power movie “Captain Marvel,” this was a very strange scene to both green-light and leave in.
At one point, Kit asks a friend “Am I attractive enough to get sexually harassed?” in a tone of voice and conversation setting that was far too cavalier for a problem of that magnitude.

During the non-sexual-harassment part of her workday, Kit receives a series of letters inviting her to “The Store,” which would give any sane person a reason to immediately buy a revolver and call the police.
But to Kit, the concerningly trusting woman-child, she happily seeks the address and finds Samuel L. Jackson, playing the polar opposite of Nick Fury.
His whimsical character feels like a good-guy version of ‘Octopus’ - the villain he played in “Spirit” (2008) and was the only character in this entire movie that I liked.
Kit’s complete willingness to enter “The Store,” to be told about, and accept, the possibility of owning a unicorn is played like a child being given a free pass in a candy store, and I was fairly concerned that this flick would turn into some kind of horror movie. Fortunately, it did not.
The staggering naivety Kit displays throughout the movie, and most heavily emphasized in “The Store,” is the kind you might expect from a very sheltered adult entering a BDSM dungeon and asking what the fox-tail buttplugs are for.

Fortunately for us, it’s not a BDSM dungeon and Samuel L. Jackson is actually willing to source a unicorn for Kit.
However, she has to work through a series of “What to expect when you’re expecting a unicorn” type folders, each one with a different set of instructions for the love and affection a unicorn needs to survive.
Lo and behold, those are the exact same instructions Kit needs to straighten out her life as a failure of an adult!
She’s making stone-soup for the soul.

A few notes that I took while watching this:

• The soundtrack seems to mostly be an original score, which is cool. It was also all played in a minor key, which gives the movie and underlying haunting feeling, and made me think of the Harry Potter movies

• An unreasonable amount of this movie appeared to be filmed by someone just holding the camera in their hand, like some dude just using his iPhone on set. As this was not an action movie, there shouldn’t have been any shaky-cam. You can buy a gimbal for $200 at an Apple store, I’ve seen them. I’d like to know why the cast and crew didn’t use one.

• Kit was tasked with making one of the competing ad campaigns for the vacuum. Apparently the company wanted to call it the “magic vac,” but it just looked like the kind of cheap plastic vacuum you can buy on Amazon for $40, and when ‘demoed’ cleaning up a bunch of glitter from the floor, it failed spectacularly. They could have at least used a Dyson.

• This movie was made in 2017 but for some reason wasn’t released until 2019. That’s not really a comment on the movie itself, it’s just weird.

The movie ends with Samuel L. Jackson actually producing the unicorn, and Kit getting to meet it, whereupon she starts a tear-soaked ramble to it about how she’s always been different and that feels bad, but she’s realized that she is a unicorn too, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I can only assume that one of the screenwriters read their tween daughter’s journal in order to come up with something so ridiculously angsty.

This was bad.
If you really like unicorns and/or Brie Larson, this is for you.
For everyone else, watch something else, like paint drying.