Mass shootings have become a tragically common occurrence in American society today. In addition to the precious lives lost regularly, which devastate families and friend groups, they leave a distinct mark on places that previously felt safe and the people who both were present at the time or just as easily could have been. That’s truest for schools, where students cycle in and out, year after year, and often turn their feelings into art. Dead Deer High examines this phenomenon through the lens of a slam poetry team guided by a teacher struggling to get back to some sense of normalcy and guide his students to a cathartic breakthrough that will allow them to channel their pain into something profound and lasting.
Mr. K (Zach Kozlow) isn’t doing well in the aftermath of a school shooting that claimed the life of one of his slam poetry students, and now he can’t even enter the classroom, teaching from outside, a habit that he’s told will lead to his dismissal if he can’t find a way to come back inside soon. Stephanie (Kyla Brown) is doing her best to steer the team in the right direction, but it’s difficult given that they’ve lost their strongest player, and JT (Holden Goyette) and Kyle (Christian Cruz) are having trouble getting along, which certainly isn’t helping their sportsmanship and collaborative process. As the competition approaches, emotions are high and so are the obstacles, threateningly to leave this team and their academic advisor stuck at a point that won’t let them engage with what’s happened and find a way to keep going.
This is not the first film to deal with the impact of a school shooting through an artistic lens. At the Sundance Film Festival, NB Mager’s Run Amok followed one determined student staging an elaborate play as tribute to her mother, a teacher killed years earlier. Dead Deer High, from director Jo Rochelle and screenwriter Joshua Roark, takes a more serious approach, extracting some awkwardness from the fact that Mr. K teaches from outside the window of his classroom but otherwise focused on the dramatic implications of this breach and violence. It’s not nearly as harrowing as something like Megan Park’s The Fallout, but it also has some distance from its inciting event, only first checking in on its protagonists after they are starting to pick up the pieces of their lives and begin to process how to be without an important fixture present in their lives.
What this film isn’t trying to do is to suggest that getting past – or better yet, getting over – a formative and life-altering experience is a necessary or healthy thing. Instead, it’s a snapshot of the process of working through grief and turning it into something that can enable everyone in the film, teacher and students alike, to understand how it has influenced them and what path it will put them on in the future. There are plenty of assumptions made about how this has affected Mr. K, and his unwillingness to engage in conversation about what he’s feeling results in others filling the silence with their own perspective. As much as this film channels and conveys what this kind of experience is like, it ultimately stresses that it’s impossible to truly understand without going through it yourself.
Rochelle’s second feature film is one that speaks to the present moment and a seemingly endless cycle of loss followed by devastation and inaction in a very potent way, through words. Its young cast proves to be its strongest asset, and watching them rehearse and perform is the best reason to see this film. Audiences may be able to tether to specific characters and the ways in which they struggle to adjust to new realities, but the film ensures a formidable and haunting finish by choosing the exact right moment to cut to black and roll the credits. Those who think they might be uncomfortable with this film’s subject matter have good reason to pause and consider if this is something they want to engage with, but the finished product is a sensitive and respectful depiction of teenagers and adults who feel real and three-dimensional trying to put the hurt they’ve experienced into the art that fulfills them.
Movie Rating: 7/10
