Something rather nasty is unfolding in Sundance horror Leviticus. If you asked the god-fearing residents of the isolated Australian town at its centre, they would say it’s the curse of homosexuality, quietly infecting the youth. If you asked the gay teens themselves, they would say it’s something far more horrifying.
In writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s indelible debut feature, queer desire is not only a danger to one’s safety from the bigots that you live, work and pray with, but it’s also a supernatural affliction. We first see teens Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) as they engage in a clandestine hang, that familiar dance of a play-fight leading into a kiss. For Naim, it’s a new world opening up, a reason to believe there might be something to be happy about in an otherwise dull new town with his warm yet clueless single mother (Mia Wasikowska). But when Naim sees Ryan engaging in a similar tryst with Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), the son of the local preacher, he allows his heart to overrule his head and does something he’ll live to regret.
Once their secret is out in the open, Ryan and Hunter are forced into a conversion-therapy ritual, led by a mysterious outsider. The boys initially laugh it off, rolling their eyes at his hokum, but something takes ahold of them and once it’s over they realise they’ve been cursed. In the world of Leviticus, the threat looks exactly like the person you desire the most, your No 1 crush wanting to crush your head in. No one else can see it and it only comes to you when you’re alone but it will keep coming until you’re dead.
It’s a crafty spin on an often lazily derivative subgenre – what if your queer desire had a demonic manifestation – and speaks to a familiar deep-rooted fear. It’s not only about the self-destruction such feelings might bring but also what horrors you might inflict on someone else as well. If the feeling is mutual, you know you’ll be the last face they’ll see before they die, a cruel tragedy warping love to hate. Like It Follows, which it owes a heavy debt to, it can also be viewed as a story about HIV/Aids and the devastation that can come from desire. This feeling might kill us both, but how can we deny it?
It lends the film not only a piercing sadness but also a swell of giddy, against-all-odds romance (love might actually tear us apart, but what if it’s worth the risk?). It would be too easy and too of the moment to dwell in the grim trauma of the story but, when ears aren’t being sliced and heads aren’t being decapitated, Chiarella leans into the epic star-crossed swoon of the story. Visually, he’s as adept at capturing the chilly horror of isolation as he is at capturing the soft-hued buzz of togetherness. Bird and Clausen have a sweet first-love chemistry in their scenes together, eyes darting around to check for safety followed by the warm rush of relief when they realise they just might be OK (an illicit bus handjob is as terrifying as any of the nasty attacks). It also makes us root for their survival even if we fear that might not be possible.
While Chiarella sets up a formula we know well, he also tries to subvert it. So yes, there might be a scene where the characters try and track down the conversion therapy “healer” but no, it doesn’t go how you expect. He also avoids obvious Bible-thumping horror stereotypes with his portrayal of the town’s religious community, realising there’s something far scarier about vile homophobia emerging from warmer, seemingly well-meaning folk such as Naim’s loving mother – a reliably excellent, if underused, Wasikowska – who is painted as more than just a Carrie’s mother in Carrie-level zealot. Even at a wonderfully concise 86 minutes, the last act runs out of steam a little (as a longtime fan of The Thing, even I got a tad tired of the familiar “No, it’s me!” repetition), but then Chiarella manages to stick the landing quite perfectly. It’s a bold and bittersweet endnote sold with the help of a soaring song choice from Frank Ocean, the kind of punchy last scene that has you insisting others make the next screening (at a festival where so many film-makers don’t know how or when to cut to credits, this counts for a lot). In many increasingly overcrowded fields – trauma horror, curse horror, gay horror, Sundance horror – Leviticus stands tall.
Leviticus is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
