James Y. Lee
Sundance’s storied tradition of featuring the best and newest to come in modern horror film remains one of the most pivotal reasons for its fixture status in American film festivals, with premieres like The Witch (2015), Get Out (2017), Hereditary (2018), and Talk to Me (2022) ranking as the most iconic among them. The past decade or so has led to an uptick in the now-maligned label of “elevated horror,” oftentimes as a result of shoddier imitators of many of these aforementioned films, but films like Leviticus—the fascinating, satisfying, incredibly tense feature debut of writer-director Adrian Chiarella—are a reminder that new filmmakers are still maintaining a firm hold on an unpretentious lens of what truly terrifies us on screen.
Much conversation has been made at this point about horror devices being used as metaphors—often clunky and unwieldy in execution—for various forms of trauma and grief. Indeed, upon learning that Leviticus concerns itself with the homophobic abominations of conversion therapy, it’s easy to assume that the curse at the center of its story will only symbolically skim the surface of the hatred it wants to represent, exchanging depth and coherence for cheap scares. But Chiarella’s film—named after the titular biblical book of Hebrew laws, which has continually been interpreted as having forbidden homosexuality under Christianity—wields metaphor to such a tightly-wound degree where the film seems to truly embody the terror of conversion therapy and homophobia on its victims.
We’ve seen the opening of Leviticus before in different forms, where the curse claims a victim peripherally relevant to the story before introducing us to its core cast. It Follows introduces us to Annie Marshall, viciously mutilated by the STD-esque unstoppable force of that film. Talk to Me shows the graphic suicide of a young man cursed by an iconically hellish embalmed hand. And Leviticus presents a young lifeguard who seems to have sex with an invisible entity in the shower of a closing public pool, before being having her head brutally smashed off-screen by said entity into the tiles of the floor only seconds later.
The two primary victims this entity will threaten over the course of the film are Naim (Joe Bird, fresh out of being relentlessly brutalized in Talk to Me as Riley) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), two boys in a conservative and Christian rural Australian community who fall head over heels in love with each other. Their expressions of queer love are deeply physical, at once sensitive and unabashedly masculine; a combination of typical male roughhousing that eventually segues into passionate intimacy. But jealousy soon suddenly ruptures their budding love. Naim’s discovery of Ryan’s seeming romantic involvement with another boy, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), prompts Naim to out the two of them to all of their parents, mustering the attention of a local pastor who seeks to cleanse them of their attraction.
The cleansing, it turns out, is the instilling of a curse that unleashes the malicious entity of Leviticus after these boys. With a prayer said over a crucifix, and an invocation uttered over a small flame, Ryan and Hunter are sent convulsing on the floor, foaming at the mouth and writhing in agony—and Naim watches it all happen. In the days that follow, Naim sees Ryan and Hunter tormented, assaulted, and attacked by an invisible force, and realizes his life may very well be under threat, as well. In the eyes of the cursed, the entity takes the form of the person they desire the most. For Ryan in particular, the entity is still taking the form of Naim. And when word begins to spread, and Naim’s ostensibly docile yet hostilely conservative mother (Mia Wasikowska) hears about his sexuality, the pastor is summoned yet again, and the curse claims Naim as well. Not long after, the apparition of “Ryan” soon begins to appear in his periphery—and it does not stop coming after Naim, day after day after day.
The central function of this entity is Leviticus‘s main draw, tied to a relatively firm set of rules that establish narrative expectations, satisfying payoffs, and incredibly pleasant surprises. The entity cannot attack Ryan or Naim while they are with other people—it exclusively preys on them in moments of loneliness and isolation, appearing spontaneously when they are on the verge of being out of sight from others, or when they are already secluded from others. It often lures its victims in with promises of intimacy, before suddenly turning violent on a dime. As it begins to familiarize itself with its victim’s subject of desire—in other words, its given form—it adopts their mannerisms more seamlessly, engaging in acts of deceit, growing more consciously malicious by the minute.
The end result of the amount of effort established here is not just a robust horror monster, but also a potent representation of the kind of malicious fear that conversion therapy aims to instill in its victims. Naim and Ryan grow to fear each other’s presence and intimacy, unsure if it’s actually them, and if their promises of comfort are true expressions of love or just lures designed to draw them into the threat of violence. The tension that results from this curse makes moments of sexual attraction between the two especially fraught with tension, as Chiarella lingers on these instances long enough for one to wonder if one of the boys will suddenly turn on a dime in the middle of their intimacy to reveal themselves as the entity. And it’s also not lost here that the end result of this curse is invariably death at the entity’s hands; not that far a conjecture from the horribly tragic fact that homophobic abuses of this sort frequently lead to the deaths and suicides of the queer children and teenagers who suffer from isolating hatred of all kinds.
But Chiarella is not a voyeur or a sadist here. This is a movie made at the hand of a director who earnestly believes in queer love and romance, and wants to trust in its persistence even in the face of such hatred. Naim and Ryan’s romance, fraught as it is as the result of this curse, still continually find ways to stick together constantly, and try to find ways to run away the religious community so dedicated to snuffing out their sexuality. Their continued rapport and love for each other is also what allows Bird and Clausen to demonstrate a decent amount of chemistry, smoothly playing off of both their characters’ fraying trust and continued attraction towards each other. And extra kudos goes to a deeply welcome yet perhaps-underutilized Mia Wasikowska for imbuing a true degree of menace into an otherwise affable-seeming maternal character, who doesn’t fully unfurl the quiet depths of her malice until the film’s final stretches.
Combined with a rudimentary formal understanding of what makes horror tropes effective, Leviticus not only lands on a thematic level but also on a genre one. Some jumpscares are truly unexpected—others might certainly seem a little cheap and aimless, but nearly all of them are deployed with relative enough deftness in timing, alongside some decently gnarly gore effects. There’s nothing in this film on a technical, formal, and genre level that pushes the envelope, necessarily, but Chiarella and co.’s overall competence in creating an overall sense of dread and providing the right jolts whenever necessary prevent Leviticus from ever faltering significantly at any point.
There are some lingering questions and loose threads by the time that Leviticus barrels towards its nerve-shredding climax and surprisingly resonant conclusion—the exploration of which could have further enhanced the religious commentary it provides about the inextricability of Christianity from modern homophobia, and the terror of the entity at its center. But it’s impossible to stare down the conclusion of Leviticus and think that this isn’t a relatively satisfying experience in a way that many horror movies aren’t lately. Even with its unexplored potential, its lack of pretension about its ideas and its cleverly intuitive means of expressing those ideas via genre are its greatest sources of admiration and terror. Leviticus‘s most impressive achievement is in how it reaches true contemporary resonance from a ruthlessly brutal, thematically focused, and satisfyingly scary experience.
