Movie Review: Dismissed

In life, most people will strive to do what it takes to get ahead in school. But it takes someone like Lucas Ward from the 2017 film ‘Dismissed’ to go as far as murdering his only friend in order to get his English teacher thrown out in order to grasp an A. Through the movie we follow Lucas Ward, a student determined to get into Harvard - no matter the cost - and his new English teacher, David Butler, who has decided not to let Lucas intimidate him. “The movie amplifies the desperation a student will go to just to get an A and only so that he can have a better life, a career that will not lead him to become a drunk loser like his father… And if anyone comes in the way of that... He's ready to kill,” writes Palvi Sharma, horror analyzer. ‘Dismissed’ is a shocking thriller movie that explores the ego and where our own lines are drawn in the superego sand, while holding many similar themes to classic horror films.

In the movie ‘Dismissed’, teen high school student, Lucas Ward, is determined to get an A. His teacher, David Butler, teaches by relying heavily on questions. When Lucas starts in his class midyear, Mr. Butler is pleasantly surprised when Lucas can intellectually answer the questions poised, as opposed to the rest of the class that seems disengaged from his lessons. When the assignment of an essay on Othello is due, Mr. Butler is shocked when Lucas hands in a novel thick essay. Diligently, Mr. Butler goes through the entire essay and scores Lucas’s work as a B+. Although it was well written, Lucas made Iago out as the hero, and Mr. Butler says that Lucas missed a lot of key emotional details in Othello. Upon seeing his grade, Lucas is shell shocked and can’t leave his desk after the bell rings, just staring at his essay. Seeing this, Mr. Butler very kindly sits down with Lucas and explains the score to him, but Lucas will hear none of it, and even asks Mr. Butler, “Where did you get your degree?” (Arfmann) Lucas begins to sabotage and threaten Mr. Butler, saying he’ll only stop if given an A. When Mr. Butler, not willing to give into threats, gives Lucas a midterm grade of an F, Lucas takes it as far as to kill a classmate, Becca, and leave a fake suicide note, implementing a relationship between Becca and Mr. Butler in an attempt to get Mr. Butler fired. But Lucas’s plans don’t work, as Mr. Butler didn’t do anything wrong, and camera footage shows Lucas setting everything up. Lucas is identified as the true villain, and is expelled from school, ruining any chance he had of getting into Harvard. In one last fit of rage, Lucas kills Mr. Butler’s wife and kidnaps his child, leaving a chess piece next to the wife’s dead body, calling Mr. Butler to the school chess club room where Mr. Butler has to stop Lucas in order to save his infant son.

The most horrifying moment in the film is when Lucas kills Becca. Up to that point in the movie, Lucas is seen as manipulative and willing to say whatever it takes in order to get what he wants. He has had small stunts of violence, like a small explosion in science class in order to be first chair in the chess club, but before Becca’s death, Lucas isn’t seen as capable of anything as large-scale as murder. The teacher at Lucas’s last school in the movie made it clear - “Bullies, they hurt people to make themselves feel big. Lucas hurts people to get what he wants. Lucas is not a bully. Lucas is a psychopath.” (Arfmann) Until he throws Becca - his only friend in the movie - off the roof, it doesn’t seem like he would take it that far. When he throws Becca off the roof, it shows that there is nothing stopping his id and ego from getting what they want. There is no superego barrier telling him to stop. There is nothing he wouldn’t do to get an A.

Lucas is strongly controlled by his ego, and lacks any sense of the superego. The theme of Freudian compulses is evident throughout the film. Everything he does is to get an A in his English class. Before receiving a B+ on his Othello essay he was a model student. After Mr. Butler gets in the way of what he wants, he uses the environment around him, with his ego, to do whatever it takes to get the id what it wants - the A. “I think what the interesting part about Lucas is that in school there are moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, societally I need to do everything I can to make sure my life is set up,' That was kind of the guilt complex and the fear complex that we wanted to portray with [Lucas] but kind of drag it out to 11,” said Dylan Sprouse, the actor who played Lucas in the movie, during an interview with IndieWire. There are a lot of students who will cheat, plagiarize, and be dishonest in their academic endeavors to get an A, but they would never think to do what Lucas did, because their superego would tell them that is not okay. Lucas slashed Mr. Butler's tire making him late for class. For most the superego would stop you from doing even that small act, telling you that society would not look kindly to that, and that is not an okay thing to do. Lucas doesn’t have that voice. He doesn’t have the superego stopping him from destroying anyone and anything that stands between him and what he wants. “I think in him being relatable it also says a little bit about our education system in a way,” Sprouse continued. For Sprouse, the character of Lucas was relatable because as an overworked college student he too has reached the point where the grade was more important than the lesson. But unlike Lucas, Sprouse has a superego, so no matter what his id wants, and the ways the ego can show to get it, he would never go as far as what Lucas did. Very few would.

Dismissed holds a lot of similar themes to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho. In Psycho, Norman Bates lives in a regular everyday setting of a motel, where people feel like they should feel safe. At this motel, Norman kills women he finds attractive. At the end of the film, his behavior is explained away by mental illness, and he is taken to a mental hospital. Similarly, in Dismissed, Lucas Ward lives in an average regular town, and goes to a normal high school, where people feel like they should feel safe. At this school, Lucas blinds a student ahead of him in line for a chess meet, kills a classmate, kills his teacher’s wife, and kidnaps and threatens to kill a baby. At the end of the film, his behavior is explained away as mental illness and he is arrested. This plays on the process of inversion. By taking an average setting and an average guy and making them terrifying, Psycho and Dismissed both have the similar effect of inverting what we would normally take as good and making them horrifying through setting and character.

Another process of inversion that Dismissed uses well, is the making of Lucas Ward being a high school child. We are taught that children are innocent, innocent coming from a term meaning harmless. Children are supposed to be harmless, but Lucas is anything but. Because of Lucas’s age, his actions seem worse and more terrifying. Max Deacon, horror analyzer said that when we “subvert our expectations of how children should be depicted, challenging the traditional images of innocence and helplessness,” the movie becomes significantly more scary. Similar tactics are used in horror hits like The Exorcist, where the person possessed by the devil is a young girl (Friedkin), Night of the Living Dead, where the young girl is turned into a zombie and bites her parents, turning them into zombie too (Romero), It’s Alive, where the baby is born a monster and kills the doctors who helped deliver him (Cohen), Children of the Corn, where the children in a town kill all the adults, and continue to kill anyone to ages over 18 (Kiersch), and Carrie where high schooler Carrie White kills everyone at prom when they drench her in blood and laugh at her. (Palma) By having the biggest threat be a child, the whole thing is scarier because we see children as harmless, and the movie proves our conceptions of the world as wrong.

Dismissed is a shocking thriller movie that explores the ego and where our own lines are drawn in the superego sand, while holding many similar themes to classic horror films by using the power of inversion. Lucas thought he was smart enough to get away and get everything he ever wanted, but in the end Mr. Butler won, and Lucas was arrested. The cost of victory though, was Mr. Butler’s wife, and Becca’s life. Lucas will continue to haunt Mr. Butler and viewers’ minds long after he's locked up.

Works Cited Page

Arfmann, Benjamin. Dismissed. Passion River Films, 2017.

Carlin, Shannon. “Dylan Sprouse's New Movie 'Dismissed' Looks Scarier than Anything You'll See on 'Riverdale' - Video.” Bustle, Bustle, 16 Nov. 2017, https://www.bustle.com/p/dylan-sprouses-new-movie-dismissed-looks-scarier-than-anything-youll-see-on-riverdale-video-5470266.

Cohen, Larry. It’s Alive. Warner Bros, 1974.

Deacon, Max. “Dismissed: Film Review.” THE HORROR ENTERTAINMENT MAGAZINE, Scream Magazine , 1 Dec. 2018, https://www.screamhorrormag.com/dismissed-film-review/.

Friedkin, William. The Exorcist. Warner Bros., 1973.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho. Paramount Pictures, 1960.

Keetley, Dawn. “Misreading Othello in the New Thriller, Dismissed - Horror Movie.” Horror Homeroom, 11 Mar. 2018, http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/misreading-othello-new-thriller-dismissed/.

Kiersch, Fritz. Children of the Corn. Angeles Entertainment Group, 1984.

Palma, Brian De. Carrie. Red Bank Films, 1976.

Righetti, Jamie. “Dylan Sprouse on His Killer New Role, Life after Disney, and Why He Doesn't Watch 'Riverdale'.” IndieWire, IndieWire, 8 Dec. 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/dylan-sprouse-return-acting-dismissed-cole-riverdale-1201904699/.

Romero, George A. Night of the Living Dead. Walter Reade Organization, 1968.

Sharma, Palvi. “Dismissed--My Take on the Movie with Spoilers!” Dismissed--My Take on the Movie with Spoilers!, 28 Mar. 2018, https://darkhorrortales.blogspot.com/2018/03/dismissed-my-take-on-movie-with-spoilers.html.