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Purity, impurity, and the legal guidelines and rituals designed to handle the boundary between them — these are the cornerstone issues of the E-book of Leviticus, the third guide of the Outdated Testomony. The themes are refracted by a crooked prism in “Leviticus,” the Australian author/director Adrian Chiarella’s phenomenally entertaining horror debut that performs like an episode of “Heated Rivalry” ghoulishly crossed with “It Follows.”
The movie opens with a menacing overture: A younger girl, working late at a public pool, appears to acknowledge somebody rinsing off within the bathe, however there’s no one there. “What are you doing right here?” she asks the open air. She enters the bathe beside the disembodied presence and begins moaning as if within the throes of a sexual encounter. However the sounds flip to screams when she is all of a sudden struck and slammed to the bottom — all by an assailant solely she will see.
From right here, the film pivots to Naim (Joe Hen), an Australian teenager who has simply moved to a brand new suburb. We meet Naim whereas he’s hanging out with a brand new classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), killing time inside an deserted mill on the sting of city. Within the cavernous, warehouse-like area, the boys flip into bodily exhibitionists, exhibiting off for each other by hoisting heavy chunks of scrap steel and flinging them throughout the smash. The competition quickly provides technique to aggression, with the excessive schoolers shoving one another, then wrestling.
However behind the toughness is one thing extra tender. Chiarella is hyper-attuned to the ways in which males not solely defend emotion by machismo, but additionally sofa affection in bodily drive. Tussling on the bottom of the mill, the boys pause as soon as Ryan has Naim in a pinned place. Ryan grins down, then kisses him. Shocked, Naim pulls away earlier than grabbing Ryan’s head to kiss him again.
So begins a story of ill-fated teenage love difficult by the truth that the boys dwell in an exceptionally repressed spiritual neighborhood. We quickly be taught that Naim’s grief-stricken single mom (Mia Wasikowska) moved them to the city so they may be a part of its native Christian parish, an nearly cultishly conservative group to which Ryan and his household additionally belong. It’s clear that on this insular social world, homosexuality is taken into account a sin. However so long as the boys can hold their romance personal — they even discuss it in code, asking each other in the event that they’ve ever “been to the mill” earlier than, moderately than asking in the event that they’ve been with different boys — their affair is secure.
The safety doesn’t final lengthy. Quickly, Naim occurs upon Ryan alone with the pastor’s son (Jeremy Blewitt), hurling stones at each other earlier than collapsing into one another’s arms to make out. Dazed and distressed, Naim sprints to the pastor’s home, the place he impulsively stories what he noticed.
That is the place the film’s horror style kicks into excessive gear, with the aggrieved pastor enlisting a deliverance healer to rid his son and Ryan of their demons. At first, the ceremony — carried out publicly earlier than the whole parish — looks as if a hoax. However because the healer grows graver, invoking notions of lust, want, and indecency, the boys bear a form of exorcism. Whereas Naim and the others watch on in horror, the boys gasp for air and tumble to the ground, writhing as foam bubbles out of their mouths.
You might be able to guess the place that is all going — which is to say, straight into “It Follows” terrain. Whoever undergoes the deliverance ceremony is thereafter haunted by a shape-shifting menace invisible to everybody however the particular person being pursued. However in contrast to that cinematic predecessor, by which the pursuer took the type of quite a lot of strangers, right here, the stalker invariably seems because the sufferer’s crush. Name it internalized homophobia incarnate.
The remaining scenes draw on acquainted teenage horror tropes, with flecks of recent perception. Horror followers are acquainted with the expertise of, “I see somebody I do know, nevertheless it’s probably not them” — it’s a primal horror conceit, dovetailing with tales about doppelgängers and changelings, possession and the uncanny acquainted extra usually. In “Leviticus,” we discover the phenomenon of the false liked one, a trope that equally seems in horror classics like “The Exorcist” and “Invasion of the Physique Snatchers” and more moderen movies like “Us” and “Speak to Me” (the latter of which additionally stars Hen).
“They need us to be fearful of one another,” Ryan tells Naim in a uncommon second of perception, referring to the Church parishioners’ objective of creating the lovers mistrust each other. For as soon as, each Naim and Ryan have undergone the deliverance ceremony — Naim is subjected to it quickly after — neither can know after they’re truly seeing each other versus after they’re being baited by the violent being. The deliverance healer, in his conservative brutality, has succeeded in making the boys instinctively flee from the particular person they love and want essentially the most.
As in lots of horror movies of this sort, plot holes begin to kind. The menace solely seems when the victims are “alone” — however how alone are we speaking? Does somebody within the subsequent room depend? How about somebody a number of meters away? There isn’t a lot consistency to the rule, nor a lot logic to the truth that bystanders appear to show a blind eye because the boys are regularly brutalized. However by attaching the acquainted ideas to queer themes — for example, suggesting that friends assume that the now-outed homosexual boys, who periodically present up bruised and bloody, are being focused by homophobic bullies — the film grounds the eeriness in real-world affliction.
“Leviticus” just isn’t an ideal horror movie; its ending feels abrupt, and a few facet plots really feel unfinished. Wasikowska, doing her greatest with a skinny character, feels notably missed. However the movie’s moody environment — together with a soundtrack stuffed with clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting journey.
Grade: B+
“Leviticus” premiered on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.
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