Could it be that “Death of a Unicorn” isn’t as clever as the folks who made seemed to believe?

Oh it certainly could.

What was sold in the trailers as a dark, droll and possibly gory farce raised expectations. And distributor A24 has cachet. But writer-director Alex Scharfman’s satiric stab at rapacious capitalism, inbred “old money,” opportunistic greed and salvation turns out to be somewhat insufferable and most definitely interminable.

We get it. It’s obvious enough. And? So?

Gathering a willing and witty cast is almost no help as this lumbering beast just drags on and on, never quite bleeding out, never really perking to life. Watching the clock doesn’t help. Muttering “Make it go away” doesn’t either.

Jenna Ortega plays another dark and somewhat disturbed teen, a nose-ringed, acne-pocked coed joining lawyer dad Elliott (Paul Rudd) on an excursion to meet Dad’s moneybags clients.

The Leopolds are the latest generation of an old pharma fortune, with a vast chateau inside of an even more vast northern Canadian nature preserve, set up as a tax dodge that guarantees they’ll never lose the land or have neighbors.

But the flight and drive up, where Dad is to finalize his position as legal proxy on their board, is fraught, as daughter Ridley is neurotic and annoyed about Dad selling out, which is worrying. The Leopolds want to meet and judge Elliot’s “family.” And Elliot just wants to close this deal and set himself and his daughter up for life.

He’s so nervous about them blowing their big chance that he’s distracted on the drive. Next thing he knows, he’s run their rented Volvo into something in the wilderness.

That “something” is on four hooves, bleeds blue-green and has a horn in the center of its head. Whatever it is, Dad figures A) “it’s suffering” and B) it’ll queer his “deal.” He finishes it off and they stuff it in the trunk.

Smashed-up rental car or not, Dad won’t admit to the Leopolds what he’s done. Patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) is imperious and dying, with doting but dithering wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) unable to focus on much else. Cocky, fickle and unfiltered idiot son Shepard (Will Poulter) talks a good game, even if none of them could make it an hour without the constant attention of long-suffering cook/servant Griff (Anthony Carrigan) and humorless majordomo Shaw (Jessica Hynes).

The “thing,” “a horselike mamalia” in the trunk isn’t dead, and as the family glosses over Elliot’s lies about what he insists never happened, they ponder what it is after it kicks its way out and is put-down again — with a bullet.

“I think we know exactly what it is,” Ridley says, between nervous sucks on her vape pen.

It’s a unicorn of myth and legend, whose blood has curative powers. Ridley’s zits vanish, for instance.

And the minute that’s established, generations of exploitive inbreeding amongst the Leopolds kick in. How can they pretend to care about this rare species and their PR-promoted “moral compasses” and kill and exploit it to prolong Odell’s life and add to their vast fortune?

The almost-moronic kid wants to snort the ground up horn and mix the blood with his favorite aperitifs, for Pete’s sake.

Only Ridley, who touched its horn and tripped-out communing with the magical creature, sounds the warning. She’s caught up researching “The Unicorn Tapestries” and knows the “Christ analogy” that this animal is supposed to be — all-curing, eternal life-bestowing, like nature itself.

Of course lizard-brained humanity can’t have nice things like that without killing them.

At some point, a central problem in writer-director Scharfman’s horror comedy becomes its unbearable weight. Who cares? About any of this or anybody in it?

Killing and rekilling a less and less convincing the more we see it CGI creature is barely worth a smirk.

Was the script better on the page, or do his skills at pitching exceed his talents? Simply being on the crew of “The Witch” and a credited producer on “Blow the Man Down” hardly explains how this got the green light.

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Jessica Hynes, Anthony Carrigan and Richard E. Grant.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Scharfman. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:47