While it is generally understood in an actor’s job description that they must be able to take on varied roles and characters, seeing actors seamlessly go from comedy to drama is still fascinating to watch, especially when the role is disturbing. The Emmy Award-winning actor and comedian Oscar Nunez is best known for playing the accountant Oscar Martinez in the sitcom The Office, yet he is set to star in one of this year’s most controversial movies, which has been described as “a successor to The Purge.”

The School Duel is an upcoming dystopian thriller movie, directed by Todd Wiseman Jr., and it looks to be a biting and violent condemnation of America’s gun violence. Movies like Starship Troopers have highlighted the ways in which patriotism can be twisted into the celebration of violence, but The School Duel is hammering its message through in a way that other similar movies have not. Many dystopian thrillers explore dark futures, but the one in this movie feels closer to home than many, making a competition out of school shootings.

How Does The School Duel Combine Elements of The Hunger Games and The Purge?

There are more movies themed around battles to the death than there might seem, with The Hunger Games arguably the most famous. The School Duel has instantly drawn parallels with The Hunger Games, but it is also similar to The Purge. Both movies are set in futures during which violence and mass murder are government-sanctioned forms of televised entertainment. However, The Hunger Games shows the games as a governmental choice to keep citizens in poverty while fighting amongst themselves, while presenting them as an ongoing punishment for an uprising. The Purge is slightly different and just as disturbing.

Both the “school duel” and “the purge” are presented as ways to stop violence by permitting brief bouts of carnage, but The Purge soon reveals that its intention is to systematically eliminate poor people through a government agenda for population control. The true reason for the competition in The School Duel is yet to be revealed, but based on the movie’s trailer, it looks set to offer a possible reason as to why gun laws have not been curbed in America in order to prevent more school shootings.

The School Duel resembles both movies, with students enlisting like the career tributes do in The Hunger Games, while the violence is encouraged through patriotic displays that appear exaggerated but visually reflect recent spectacles in the news. This aspect echoes The Purge, which presents the propaganda-fueled New Founding Fathers of America as the mastermind behind the event, while The School Duel is set in The Free State of Florida, implying that Florida is now a self-governing area separate from the US.

Is The School Duel Darker Than Even The Purge?

The Hunger Games and The Purge tackle extremely dark subject matter, but both sanitize it to an extent. Much of the violence in The Hunger Games is not shown onscreen, while the costumes and setting distract from the brutality. On the other hand, The Purge often uses dark comedy that allows the viewer to forget that some of the more extreme-sounding aspects in the movie have been proposed in reality. The casting of Nunez as Governor Anthony Ramiro is spot-on, as he is such an unexpected choice and a person we are not used to seeing in a disturbing context.

The School Duel shows a dystopian future that is eerily close to reality, with school shootings repeating while opposition to current gun laws is presented as unpatriotic. This sets The School Duel up to be even darker than The Purge. The movie does not even allow color to distract the viewer as it is shot in black and white. While the set-up is far from original, this is the closest a movie has come to an issue that is concerning many, and for Nunez, it is as different as it could possibly be from the cozy comedy of The Office