By Jason Osiason
Leviticus is the real deal. It’s a marvelously directed queer horror movie, a reverse exorcism built out of conversion therapy, and the idea underneath all the blood is one I keep turning over, that fear makes us strong but love is what makes us worth being strong for.
Naim, played by Joe Bird, and Ryan, played by Stacy Clausen, are two teenage boys in a deeply religious Australian community, the kind of place where everybody’s mother is in the same church group and nobody’s business stays their own for long. Their relationship gets discovered and condemned, and the condemning takes the form of a church intervention meant to purge what they feel for each other, and what that intervention actually does is let something loose. From then on the thing hunting them wears the face of the person each of them wants most, which is to say it wears the other one’s face. Desire itself becomes the villain. That out of body, losing control feeling you get the first time you want somebody is reframed as the real terror, and so what starts as spiritual correction turns into a nightmare where the very thing they feel for each other is the force stalking them through the dark. Adrian Chiarella makes that premise feel simple and inevitable, which is the hardest trick in horror, and this is his first feature, which is almost rude.
The scares and the gore are genuinely terrifying, and when the film finally unleashes them they hit with brutal force, but that’s not what sets Leviticus apart. What sets it apart is how richly it’s built on character. Movies like Talk to Me and It Follows lean almost all their weight on the strength of the central concept, and the concept carries them, and that’s fine. This one builds its horror out of the emotional connection between the boys at the center, so that every scare is also a scene about two kids who want each other and have been told that wanting is the thing that will kill them. Bird plays Naim shy and watchful and the whole movie you can see him deciding whether he’s allowed to have this. Clausen plays Ryan harder, more forward, the one who acts first and thinks after, and the way those two energies meet is the real engine of the thing. The direction is confident and controlled, Chiarella lets quiet dread simmer for long stretches before the violence breaks through, and the result feels less like a gimmick and more like a deeply felt story about shame and desire and the terrifying power structures that try to control both.
And then the ending lands like a punch to the chest. There’s a hauntingly moving final scene that completely reframes everything before it, and it kept going in my head long after the credits had finished. It is rare for a horror movie to stick the landing with this much emotional force, and Leviticus does exactly that, and I have a feeling that last moment is going to stay with me all year. [A]
