The School Duel Review (Fantasia 2025)
Riddled with the exit wounds of religious indoctrination, The School Duel spits in the guilty face of American gun culture.
The Free State of Florida has abolished all gun restrictions, and mass shootings are at an all-time high. Candidates are being selected at Freedom Bell Middle School to compete in a statewide bloodbath called School Duel.
Pupil Samuel Miller is sick of being bullied and pursues the sick carnage in search of infamy, riches and a way to honour his dead father. Exploiting parental consent clauses and decked out in his daddy’s oversized boots, young Sammy intends to enter the state-sponsored slaughter show as an underdog and exit a hero.
Let’s get the obvious comparisons out of the way. This film will inevitably draw parallels with The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and Death Race 2000; however, it’s an entirely different beast.
In truth, its focus on the cruelty inherent in kids, along with a stripped-back realism and heartbreaking coda, makes The Lord of the Flies far more of a spiritual running mate.
Shot mainly in the stark black and white bubble of a dystopian delusion, it flirts with fish-eye lens Orwellian and Kafkaesque observations and seethes with the kitchen sink dramatics of the 50’s and 60’s. It finds a natural ally in the cinematic partition of security camera footage and blossoms with colour only briefly during one astonishingly beautiful sequence.
The movie dresses up its monochrome melancholia with all the finery of militarism. The jingoistic pep talks are cannon fodder duplicity, and the bloodthirsty patriotism all too resonant—traditional songs and melodies from America’s savage history, such as ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘When Johnny Comes marching Home’, serenade us like unheeded ghosts.
At the core of the narrative is the brand of religious mania that replaces compassion with illogical, indoctrinated hatred. A freak show of what can happen when moral autonomy is relinquished into the clutches of career politicians and opportunistic champions of disinformation.
Sammy’s mother, played exquisitely by Christina Brucato, is happy to embrace the beatings and hypocrisy of his Christian school, where the lawnkeeper mows clutching an automatic rifle. Yet, she is hysterically mortified when she is put under house arrest to watch her 13-year-old blasting shotgun holes in his peers. It is left unspoken, but it is obvious she has voted for the ringmasters of such evil.
The central premise of this sad and despairing film is irrational, sadistic, and self-defeating. The truly depressing thing is that it does not feel immediately implausible, given humanity’s prevailing disconnect from truth and dignity.
The School Duel squeezes rivers of spiteful satire from the bitter fruits that currently ripen in our poisonous political landscape. It’s anti-theist, anti-war, anti-influencer and utterly anticipatory of the grave mankind is digging for itself.
Ironically, this brave and brutal film is a call to arms for those willing to question the loyalties and ideologies of our changing world before it is too late. Or as William Golding once wrote – “If I blow the conch and they don’t come back… We’ll be like animals… If you don’t blow, we’ll soon be animals anyway.”
★★★★
Canadian premiere at Fantasia, 31st July 2025 / Kue Lawrence, Christina Brucato, Michael Sean Tighe, Oscar Nuñez / Dir: Todd Wiseman Jr
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