Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut, Leviticus, arrives with a brilliant, agonizing premise that promises to redefine queer horror, yet the film ultimately falters under the weight of its own derivative mechanics. By transforming the psychological violence of conversion therapy into a literal, shape-shifting demon that takes the form of the person its victims desire most, Chiarella attempts to expose how fundamentalist weaponization of guilt turns love into a death sentence. But while the independent feature boasts standout performances from Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, its over-reliance on tropes borrowed directly from It Follows dilutes its radical message. It stalls right when it should strike.
The film operates within the bleak, sun-bleached industrial edges of suburban Australia. This is not the vibrant, cosmopolitan Australia of urban centers, but an isolated enclave dominated by a fundamentalist Christian community where conformity is a survival mechanism. Naim, played with a fragile, bruised intensity by Joe Bird, is a quiet newcomer trying to escape notice alongside his enigmatic mother, portrayed with chilling ambiguity by Mia Wasikowska. When Naim encounters Ryan, a brash, volatile local boy played by Stacy Clausen, their initial friction quickly melts into an intense, hidden romance. They find refuge in an abandoned mill, a crumbling concrete monument to an expired industrial era, where they clumsily navigate their attraction through a mix of adolescent roughhousing and tentative, secret intimacy. For a deeper dive into this area, we recommend: this related article.
The horror begins when the community detects their transgression. Rather than relying entirely on realistic social ostracization, Leviticus introduces a terrifying supernatural intervention administered by an aging local pastor. Through a brutal, ritualistic conversion exorcism, the church inflicts a spiritual curse on anyone harboring same-sex attraction. The mechanics of this curse are psychological torture made flesh. The victim begins to see hallucinations of the person they long for the most. This entity walks toward them with a slow, mechanical gait, appearing perfectly ordinary until the victim lowers their guard, at which point the apparition turns violently homicidal.
The Fractured Rules of the Supernatural Chase
The central conceit is a devastatingly accurate metaphor for internalized homophobia. To live under the curse means that the face of your lover becomes the instrument of your destruction, forcing a profound, systemic distrust of your own basic instincts. For additional background on the matter, extensive analysis can also be found at GQ.
Unfortunately, the screenplay struggles to maintain the internal logic of this supernatural threat. A horror film built around a strict curse demands rigid, unyielding rules to establish tension. If the audience does not understand the boundaries of the danger, the fear dissolves into confusion. In Leviticus, the entity's behavior changes depending on the needs of the immediate set piece rather than following a coherent internal philosophy. At times, the monster can only be seen by the afflicted individual, creating a deeply isolating atmosphere of madness. In other sequences, the entity interacts with the physical environment in ways that suggest it occupies a shared reality, muddying the waters of what is real and what is hallucination.
This inconsistency exposes the film’s massive structural debt to David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 masterpiece, It Follows. The parallels are too distinct to ignore. The relentless, slow-walking stalker that can take any human form, the youthful protagonists left entirely unhelped by an indifferent adult world, and the desolated suburban backdrop all feel lifted directly from the older film. Where Mitchell used the curse to explore the existential dread of mortality and the vulnerabilities of adolescent sexuality, Chiarella hitches these exact same visual motifs to religious trauma.
The adaptation of these mechanics does not quite fit the new thematic framework. In It Follows, the curse was passed through a physical act, establishing a clear chain of custody that drove the plot forward. In Leviticus, the curse is triggered by the community's judgment and individual betrayal. When Naim, overwhelmed by jealousy and fear of exposure, accidentally informs on Ryan, the narrative machinery becomes tangled. The film tries to balance a traditional supernatural curse narrative with a complex drama about guilt, informant culture, and systemic oppression, but the two halves constantly pull against each other. The horror sequences interrupt the character development, and the character development repeatedly halts the momentum of the scares.
The Chaste Contradiction of Modern Queer Horror
For a film explicitly focused on the policing of desire, Leviticus exhibits a strange, frustrating hesitation when it comes to depicting physical intimacy. The production displays a crippling earnestness that frequently crosses over into the saccharine, neutering the very sexual charge that is supposedly powerful enough to summon demons.
The romance between Naim and Ryan is the emotional core of the production, yet their physical connection is treated with an almost chaste gentleness. Their encounters are captured in soft, diffused lighting, emphasizing sweet longing over raw teenage heat. This creative choice creates a striking thematic disconnect. The religious community views their love as an unspeakable, fleshly abomination demanding violent eradication, but the audience is shown an innocent, almost childlike courtship. By sanitizing the physical reality of queer desire, the film accidentally validates the puritanical framework it seeks to critique, treating the actual mechanics of sex as something best kept off-screen.
This timidity undermines the horror. Horror and eroticism have been linked for centuries because both deal with the loss of bodily control and the crossing of societal boundaries. When a movie about a sexual curse refuses to look directly at the sex itself, the stakes feel manufactured. The threat loses its edge. If the desire is entirely spiritual and emotional, the visceral terror of a monster hunting the body feels disconnected from the sin it is supposedly punishing. The film wants to be an edgy piece of outsider art, but it frequently retreats into the safe, comforting language of a standard coming-of-age television drama.
Performative Brilliance in an Industrial Wasteland
What prevents the project from collapsing entirely under these structural flaws is the exceptional caliber of its lead performances. Joe Bird, who previously demonstrated his genre capabilities in the global hit Talk to Me, proves here that he is one of the most compelling young actors working today. He gives Naim a deep, quiet gravity.
Bird works primarily through his eyes, communicating a lifetime of displacement, vigilance, and quiet yearning without the need for heavy-handed expository monologues. He manages to make a protagonist who is often passive, reactive, and prone to terrible decisions deeply sympathetic. When Naim watches Ryan from across a crowded schoolyard, Bird captures the exact mix of terror and fascination that defines the closeted adolescent experience.
Stacy Clausen provides the perfect counterweight as Ryan. He imbues the character with a volatile, defensive bravado that masks a profound vulnerability. Ryan is the classic small-town bully-adjacent figure, someone who lashes out at the world because he cannot cope with his own internal reality. Clausen handles this transition beautifully, showing how the character's aggressive, defensive exterior crumbles into absolute terror once the Deliverance Healer pays him a visit. The chemistry between the two leads is palpable and tragic, anchoring the film’s best moments in genuine human pain rather than digital special effects.
The supporting cast adds a layer of surreal, unsettling tension to the narrative. Mia Wasikowska shines in a limited role as Naim’s mother. She plays the character with a calculating neutrality, leaving the audience constantly guessing whether she is an accomplice to the community’s fundamentalism or merely another victim trying to survive it. Her long, silent glares from across the kitchen table are often far scarier than the actual supernatural entities stalking her son. The cinematography complements these performances by capturing the bleak beauty of the Australian setting. The towering smokestacks, abandoned warehouses, and overgrown fields create a gothic environment that mirrors the moral stagnation of the characters.
The Financial Calculations of Social Horror
The industrial journey of Leviticus explains a great deal about its aesthetic compromise. Developed through VicScreen’s Originate initiative and produced by Causeway Films, the project was tailor-made for the modern international festival circuit. Its selection for the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival, followed by a high-profile seven-figure worldwide acquisition by Neon, highlights a growing corporate hunger for elevated, socially conscious genre films.
This market demands a specific product. It requires films that possess enough artistic pedigree and thematic relevance to generate critical discussion, while remaining accessible enough to appeal to broader genre audiences. Leviticus satisfies these requirements perfectly on paper, but the actual execution reveals the limitations of this corporate genre hybridization. By trying to be an urgent piece of social commentary and a commercial jump-scare engine at the exact same time, the movie diminishes both elements. The message becomes compromised by the need for conventional third-act resolutions, and the scares become bogged down by thematic heavy lifting.
The few moments where Chiarella breaks free from conventional formulas offer a glimpse of a far more daring movie. There is a brilliantly executed sequence midway through the film that plays with the audience's perception of the monster, using silence and spatial geometry to subvert an expected scare into an unsettling realization about the nature of the curse. It is a sequence that relies on pure cinematic craft rather than borrowed ideas, demonstrating that Chiarella possesses the technical skills to be a major voice in horror. But these moments are brief oases in a feature that otherwise feels overly cautious.
The Cost of Safe Subversion
The current cinematic environment is saturated with films that use horror as a convenient wrapper for trauma, identity, and grief. This trend has produced masterpieces, but it has also created a new set of clichés. Filmmakers frequently substitute clear thematic metaphors for actual narrative invention, assuming that if the subtext is important enough, the text itself can be predictable.
Leviticus falls into this exact trap. The subtext regarding the horrors of queer erasure and the psychological damage of conversion therapy is undeniable, urgent, and angry. But an important message does not automatically make a great film. By borrowing its rules from It Follows and its tone from chaste teenage romances, the film insulates the audience from the true, jagged danger of its subject matter. It turns an existential nightmare into a series of predictable genre beats.
True outsider art does not seek to comfort or conform to the structural expectations of the marketplace. It forces the viewer into spaces that are deeply uncomfortable, challenging both their moral and aesthetic assumptions. Chiarella's debut has all the raw ingredients for this kind of confrontational cinema, but it chooses a safer path. It settles for being an auspicious, well-acted debut rather than the revolutionary piece of queer horror it could have been. The real horror of conversion therapy is that it forces you to destroy yourself from the inside out. By making that destruction look so familiar, Leviticus lets the systems behind that violence off the hook entirely.
