The School Duel Review: A Different Kind of School Shooting

There are moments in the bleak social commentary of The School Duel that make it clear that satire is dead. Or rather, that the extremity of what is happening in American culture is so grotesque that it’s almost impossible to push into the realm of absurdist commentary.

Yet maybe that’s when writer/director Todd Wiseman’’s brutal black-and-white caricature of the good ol’ USA  is most effective: when it simply reflects what you suspect some people already want. When young Sammy Miller (Kue Lawrence, Marshmallow, Sketch) is paddled by the principal of his school (Eugenie Bondurant), a school where every student wears a cross on their uniform, is that unrealistic? When the friendless boy then stomps home through the white picket fence suburbs, past the neighbor mowing the lawn with an AR-15 over his shoulder, would most people even look twice at the kid or the gun?

Through subtle shading, Wiseman guides the story into unreality. It’s not just a Christian school, but a Christian public school, and guns are so ubiquitous that even that principal has a display case of rifles in her office. The only real extremity is the idea that the government would hold the School Duels, a version of Battle Royale with that added American necessity that the bloodshed must be streaming. Note Sammy’s slight befuddlement that the grizzled veteran (Michael Sean Tighe) sent to recruit him as his school’s representative even cares that the blood bath will be televised. It’s those added contemporary moments that means The School Duel avoids feeling like a redundant riff on The Running Man. And of course, this happens in Florida. Because of course it does.

But more important than any modern setdressing is Wiseman’s decision to really focus on Sam’s motivations for being so eager to become a state-sanctioned teenage murderer for a day. He’s somewhere between future school shooter and class sadsack, loading his dead daddy’s shotgun to a brass band rendition of “Amazing Grace” while absorbing a steady media diet of low-grade manosphere rhetoric: It’s only because he’s a nebbishy dweeb, shortest and weakest of his class, that there’s any degree of sympathy for him. 

He is undoubtedly a victim of a system built on the blood of children, as is his widowed mother (Christina Brucato), who gives her son access to firepower for being well-behaved, as is every teen in the duel and the adults who cheer them on. They’re all in the sway of the half-logic of the School Duel, with its talk of kings and martyrs, sheep and wolves, as laid out by the callous Governor Romano (Oscar Nuñez) in what sounds suspiciously like a stump speech for national office. That sense of giddy inevitability is what makes this the mirror universe version of The Long Walk. In that more emotionally grueling and equally politically pointed adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian drama, the boys were deluded by desperation. Here, it’s ego, machismo, and greed. After all, what’s a reality game show without a big money cash prize?

Wiseman also isn’t afraid to point out how video games and gangster rap, especially the kind promulgated by rich white boy wannabes, have normalized the idea of violence as cool. As for Sammy’s streaming life, it’s hard not to imagine that Mr. Beast isn’t mad that he didn’t think of School Duels first. Yet the real target is how the American state churns through the bodies of young men just to keep everyone in line. Often the message is delivered in an overly obvious fashion, like how Sammy’s fellow competitors hit all the stereotypes of the genre (the Pete Hegseth-esque lantern-jawed jock bully, the street-tough Black kid with a kind streak, the nervy one that makes a run for the fence and gets gunned down). Equally, the despairing denouement becomes only more and more inevitable, but that’s really the film’s point: how hideously successful and accepted this inhuman system has become. In that regard, Wiseman hits center mass.

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This article appears in May 8 • 2026.