Leviticus film review: Horror with a human face
A chilling queer horror that makes societal shame its most frightening monster
This has undoubtedly been the year of the horror film, with imaginative indie releases Obsession and Backrooms making close to $900 million between them, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple attracting critical adoration, and the reboot of Resident Evil from Zach Cregger (director of Barbarian and the Oscar-winning Weapons) imminent. Queer Australian chiller Leviticus deserves to be counted amongst them, yet seems unlikely to experience huge commercial success due to an increasingly sexually intolerant climate.
It’s this rising hate that makes the film particularly pertinent. Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Adrian Chiarella, it tells the story of Joe Bird’s Naim, who moves with his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) to an evangelical Christian town in Victoria, following the death of his father. Naim is attracted to another boy, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), and the feeling is seemingly mutual. However, when he sees Ryan kissing the pastor’s son Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), Naim is devastated and informs on the pair in anger. Hunter’s parents call in a ‘deliverance healer’ (Nicholas Hope) and, during the resulting gay exorcism, the two boys enter a trance, before violently convulsing, while in the aftermath they are haunted by an evil entity, taking the form of the person they desire most.
Some of the film’s finer narrative details need finessing but Leviticus is bolstered by its superb performances and by its premise, which plays brilliantly, and rather movingly, on personal shame and societal stigma. It’s beautifully shot in faintly murky fashion by Tyson Perkins, and unsettlingly scored by Jed Kurzel (The Babadook). There’s a touch of the excellent It Follows in the execution and a couple of ferociously frightening moments, although it’s the grounded and gritty feel that keeps things rivetingly credible. The film’s truthfulness really makes its horror hit home, with Chiarella emerging as one to watch.
Leviticus is in cinemas now.