The School Duel, the feature directorial debut of Todd Wiseman Jr., contemplates a horrific solution to school shootings. In a “near-future” Free State of Florida, young teenager Sammy looks like he may be going down the path of a school shooter—until he is recruited for the state’s annual “School Duel,” in which middle school children participate in a Hunger Games-style deadly competition.
While the film borrows the long-running concept of a death-match, it strips it away from most of its far-flung dystopian visions and attempts to draw it much closer to home, in a world we all know. To some, that may come off as too on the nose. For instance, a principal paddles Sammy in one scene while chastising him for bludgeoning another student with a weapon. There’s a dark irony there, played with no hint of humor by the characters or the camera.
The beating heart of the movie is the performance of Kue Lawrence as Sammy. While Lawrence is just 14 years old, he is no stranger to the screen. He played a younger version of Timothée Chalamet in Beautiful Boy, among numerous film and TV projects in his young life. But you see both sides of Sammy: the meek and mild, polite young boy that he often is around his mother and schoolteachers, and the repressed rage and internalized ideas of masculinity he has been absorbing.
We see this switch flip in a single scene when Sammy asks his mother (Christina Brucato) to give him a high-and-tight haircut like his deceased military father, which she gently rebuffs. But the cut is important to Sammy’s sense of identity, and he lets loose in a genuinely scary outburst that shows the danger humming below the surface.
Exactly how Sammy gets recruited for this duel, where contestants are often labeled as “kings and martyrs,” has to be seen for itself.
While Lawrence is the key performance, Oscar Nuñez of The Office fame brings the starpower as the governor of Florida and creator of the School Duel, believing it will reduce school shootings in the state and that it is better for the children to all be shooting at “hard targets” rather than “soft targets” in a school building. His appearance is short, but appropriately scary in his callousness toward the reality of the event, which is also televised and marketed as a patriotic service by the young men who compete.
Whether the plot itself works for you or you find it too blunt, there’s no doubt that the imagery and performances are haunting and beautifully realized.
