Leviticus is a Brutally Lovely & Queer Horror Story

Writer-director Adrian Chiarella paints a fearsome picture that perfectly supports the romance at its core.

(NEON / Maslow Entertainment)

The most consequential three-way call I’ve ever been part of was in junior high, in 2002. My best friend had conferenced me in for moral support: a classmate of ours was frantically packing to run away.

Let’s call him Caleb. He’d made no secret of being gay, but apparently his mother had decided enough was enough that night and threatened to call an exorcist. Locking himself in his room, Caleb had dialed around for help. I remember it being an awful sensory cycle: his mom shrieking through the door, his voice wobbling with panic, my stomach clenching over and over again. Mid-call, my friend and I took turns switching lines and scouring AOL Instant Messenger to find a place for him to crash.

Eventually, we had to hang up when Caleb successfully made a break for it from his bedroom window. I wondered if exorcists even existed in Montgomery, Alabama. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Caleb’s mother. What was it about her thirteen-year-old son liking boys that made fear her reaction and spiritual warfare her solution?

*Leviticus* is a story that plays out the social and cosmic anxiety at the center of that question.

(NEON / Maslow Entertainment)

Naim (Joe Bird) and his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) are new to a small, industrial Australian town. Arlene moved them there to be part of the local faith community. Naim doesn’t find much resonance in the local church meetings, but he does find Ryan (Stacy Clausen). They do the sort of things teenagers often do in towns they hate: poke around fields, break into an abandoned mill, make out until their own exhilaration sends them running home.

Through a disturbing course of events involving the pastor’s son, Naim and Ryan’s parents discover their sons’ activities and take them to a “deliverance healer.” The man wields a crucifix and a flame, insisting that their lust, indecency, and desires must be eradicated immediately. The result is a cruel manifestation: a violent entity that takes the form of the person they’re most attracted to — each other.

This is writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature, and it’s full of texture, yearning, brutality, and subtext. I’m always impressed when a filmmaker can let a horror story and a love story coexist. It’s hard when both elements need the same time and space to build tension. Horror uses the climax to flip its dread into a crescendo of terror, while romance uses that peak to satisfy all emotional curiosities with full-on indulgence. Leviticus nails the real-world crux of the shared tension: what chance do queer teenage lovers have of fumbling towards fulfillment if outsiders succeed in coercing them into fearing themselves and each other?

(NEON / Maslow Entertainment)

Leviticus pulls from real experiences of queer kids whose parents sent them to “conversion” therapy or camps. Chiarella has turned that traumatic emotional experience into a supernatural visual language: if these conversion attempts actually mutated from the spiritual to the physical, it might look like your paramour, turned violent and predatory. Imagine being conditioned into running for your life every time you saw the only person around who gets you. A total disruption of your inner world, but more convenient for the townsfolk.

Speaking of the town, Chiarella is a fantastic visual storyteller. Everyone and everything is drenched in worn earth tones, and the granite-walled church tells you what you need to know about what role faith plays in these people’s lives. No stained glass or majestic altars — faith, to them, is a literal, operational part of life. They interpret the hierarchy of the divine on the practical plain. You see it in the structures of the town, in all the houses with peeling paint and bare bones, recreational centers devoid of color, and one looming factory at the center of it all.

This knack for communicating mood by way of symbolism is my favorite thing about Chiarella’s approach. Industrialism as a devotional practice is a reverberating theme. Where houses and public structures are dark and dilapidated, the factory is the big, shiny thing everyone else is expected to function against. He also tends to frame Naim and Ryan against the looming sky — big universe, little me — but there’s always something else in between his subject and the cosmos: power lines. (Listen for the subtle buzzing sounds.) There’s something there that asks us to engage with this love story under both man-made control and a more natural, universal order.

(NEON / Maslow Entertainment)

Those lofty ideas are well-anchored by a tight script, plus excellent performances from Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen. Both of them gave their pairing the subtle, giddy charge it deserves amid teenage awkwardness and rising panic. There’s also a shared understanding that queer desire (and all the vulnerability that comes with it) is sometimes only possible in liminal spaces — free of existing structure, ripe for discovery — and it was bittersweet to watch them embody that shift between settings.

In a pool of queer media that’s still learning not to make trauma the central part of their characters’ identities, I think Leviticus is unique in its earnestness, especially as a horror movie. It gives terror all the room it needs to show us how suffocating Naim and Ryan’s “deliverance” is, but it never drops the ball on their hope that they’ll escape it. Fear might be a useful survival tool, but it’s too restrictive to hold a candle to what hope can do if you keep choosing it.

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