Those of us bullied as children may have had a fantasy about enacting bittersweet revenge on those who wronged us — but hopefully nothing quite as violently disturbing as the fantasy that plays out in Todd Wiseman Jr.’s queasy, upsetting “The School Duel.” In this movie, the foaming compulsion toward school shootings in young people is sublimated into a spectator sport: a Florida State-mandated, fight-to-the-death competition that’s equal parts “The Purge” and “Hunger Games.”
Turn on American news coverage any day, and you’re likely to tune into the story of a mass shooting — an epidemic that’s become as quintessential to the United States as apple pie. Head to your local cineplex, and you’re likely to be reminded of it, too: See A24’s recent “The Drama.” Head to your local opera house (that would be the Metropolitan if you’re in New York), and you’ll see it, too, in the latest interpretation of the dissonant Finnish saga “Innocence,” about a school shooting’s ripple effect on a wedding.
A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot “The School Duel” is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence. Shot with cold control in black and white by cinematographer Kyle Deitz, Wiseman’s feature debut is a stylish thriller that launched at regional festivals in 2024; what must have seemed near-future about it then seems almost too present-day in 2026. Other than the holographic rectangles that here have replaced phones as handheld doomscrolling devices, “The School Duel” is harrowingly close to our own world. Here, nationalism and religion rule the day in a Florida where gun control has been entirely abolished — did I say this was speculative fiction?
Wiseman packs a lot of ambition into the film‘s compact frames (not only is it shot in a boxy ratio, but the film also runs under a tight 90 minutes) to leave you curious to see what he might do with a bigger canvas.
Troubled seventh grader Samuel Miller (Kue Lawrence) is a latchkey kid living in an ordinary suburban home with his single mother, Beth (Christina Brucato). Psychologically reeling from the death of his military father, Samuel keeps dad’s dogtags close at hand and with an eventual curiosity toward his assault rifle. Life in middle school (the worst time of any adolescence) isn’t much better. Samuel is tormented in the locker room by his more conventionally, blandly likable classmates — and it’s that location, coursing with the fear felt by anyone who’s been bullied around gym class, that Wiseman turns into its own kind of warzone. When Samuel finally reacts violently to one more bullying episode, he’s interrogated by an imperious, swan-necked principal (Eugenie Bondurant) who ends up blaming him, not his tormentors, for the incident.
Looming over it all in this version of Florida is a dystopian answer to school shootings: give the kids an AR-15 and free rein to pick each other off for a day, to channel their anxiety, in the form of arena combat until only one is left standing. In that sense, “The School Duel” would make a chilling double feature with last year’s “The Long Walk,” the walk-til-you’re-dead Stephen King adaptation about high school boys competing until only one remains alive. (Think of Captain Segmann here, played by Michael Sean Tighe, as the Mark Hamill of it all, meaning not to be trusted.)
Some boys have been training for years for The School Duel, while others, like Samuel, have been identified as at risk of committing a shooting themselves. Samuel is too comfortable with his father’s assault rifle, pantomiming intimidation into the mirror like a 13-year-old Travis Bickle. The goal of The School Duel he’s conscripted into is to make one boy a king, the rest “martyrs,” and Samuel is not about to become a martyr.
Wiseman leaves much in the way of character development at the door, making “The School Duel” in its second half feel like entering a detached third-person shooter video game, which becomes increasingly distancing the more it tries to be immersive. Equally detached is Oscar Nuñez as Governor Anthony “The Ram” Ramiro, who encourages and supervises the competition. As in “The Long Walk,” anyone who tries to forfeit The School Duel is promptly killed, heightening the stakes and the boys’ adrenaline in combat. Meanwhile, a gyrating troupe of pom-pommed cheerleaders gleefully chants “shotgun, shotgun, shotgun” as those at home are themselves made to watch and cheer on the duel from the rafters, and on broadcast. (Not Samuel’s mother, who has a different plan.)
There’s a charming inconsistency to the performances that at times makes “The School Duel” feel like a dusted-off lost B-movie from yesteryear, but Lawrence’s turn gets better as it rolls on, as bodies start dropping. There’s no warmth in this movie, which is drained of emotional affect despite the galvanizing filmmaking that potentially promises otherwise. Samuel’s ascension from a boy who simply “qualified” for the duel, and who never fired a gun before, is thinly drawn up to the point where he starts pitching alliances to other fighters.
Where Wiseman locates emotion is in the use of the camera, the shifts in filmmaking style, especially as the movie, for a brief moment, flips to color. If you want a character piece, don’t look here. If you want to gaze into a cracked mirror that reflects the extreme endgame of ideology, and of our impulses toward violence both fed by and feeding into media consumption, behold “The School Duel.” “I’ll see you in hell, which is better than this shithole state,” one of Samuel’s comrades tells him in his dying breath. State? How about world?
Grade: B
Altered Innocence opens “The School Duel” in select theaters starting Friday, April 24.
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