Source: The Conversation – UK
You can imagine being a queer teen in a Christian fundamentalist community in rural Australia is not an easy ride. In his debut feature Leviticus, writer and director Adrian Chiarella imagines how much harder that would be if there were also supernatural forces conspiring against you.
The film centres on the burgeoning romance between 17-year-old Naim – played by Joe Bird, who recently impressed in the wonderful Australian horror film Talk to Me (2022) – and Ryan (Stacy Clausen). The pair are forced to attend a fire-and-brimstone sexual conversion therapy session with a fundamentalist “healer” on a mission to convert the town’s gay and lesbian teens.
After sessions with this mysterious figure end in Exorcist-style convulsions and gouts of vomit, participants are pursued by an entity that looks identical to the person they desire most. In classic horror-film fashion, if a teen succumbs to their desire for the lookalike, they are torn to shreds in the midst of sex. Ryan and Naim are caught between their desire for one another and the fact that the person they become intimate with might kill them.
Leviticus is an excellent independent drama. The film’s success lies less in its execution of effective scares and horror tropes and more in the emotionally resonant, superbly acted depiction of a forbidden young gay relationship in an oppressive community. Save one or two jump scares, it is not an especially harrowing or nail-biting horror spectacle. But the film builds a desolate atmosphere and creates a complex and likeable young couple for audiences to root for.
Chiarella has based his screenplay on his experiences as a gay man growing up in Sydney, Australia, which he adapts with heady atmosphere into a beautifully desolate depiction of rural Australia.
With the success of Backrooms (2026), about horror lurking in an endless network of interconnected rooms, horror filmmakers and audiences are particularly attuned right now to in-between spaces and the inherent creepiness to be found in the blandly everyday. Leviticus follows other excellent examples of Australian mystery and horror cinema, from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Wolf Creek (2010) and Killing Ground (2016), in using the unique starkness of the countryside to convey a distinctive strangeness and melancholy.
Leviticus was shot in rural townships west of Melbourne. It depicts the Australian small town as we might expect to see an oppressive southern gothic American backwater. Outside of the judgmental eyes of the town, romantic encounters take place in haunting liminal spaces. These include dilapidated barns surrounded by abandoned rusted machinery and across stretches of bleak, blanched grassland.
Mia Wasikowska is superb in the film as Naim’s young mother, Arlene. You might recognise her from films like Tim Burton’s awful Alice in Wonderland (2010) or Jane Eyre (2011). After such early career success, Wasikowska rejected Hollywood and fame for a series of interesting and unconventional independent films like Leviticus.
Arlene has converted to Christian fundamentalism after the death of her son’s father. Wasikowska articulates with moving complexity the tension between the love for her son and her anxiety around his sexuality within the context of the intolerant wider community.
The main conceit of Leviticus is simple but clever: transgressive sexual desire = death. The pursuit of teenagers by a relentless entity after sexual activity has been explored in the influential and acclaimed film, It Follows (2014) – a film that Chiarella cites as an inspiration for Leviticus. That film was similarly set in the downbeat environment of a small rural town. Its “monster” also in part represents the simultaneous excitement and anxiety of young desire. In Leviticus, however, the anxiety is a specifically queer one, where longing, self-acceptance and internalised shame battle for dominance in the young mind.
The film scholar Harry Benshoff influentially wrote about horror film through a queer lens, pointing out the tension between horror cinema’s popularity among LGBTQ+ audiences and the genre’s subtext of societal homophobia.
Monsters in some of the biggest horror films, from A Nightmare on Elm Street’s (1984) Freddy Krueger to Terrifier’s (2016) Art the Clown, have been interpreted as physical embodiments of the homophobic fear of repressed transgressive queer sexual urges. At the same time these figures have been paradoxically embraced as queer icons that challenge the norms of a repressive society.
In Leviticus, this subtext of queer horror is made into a conscious, deliberate theme. The film is perhaps a little too determined that audiences grasp its themes at the expense of being allowed to make their own interpretations. But overall, is a beautifully made, eerie and emotionally sophisticated horror film. Its two charismatic young stars are clearly destined for bright careers and Adrian Chiarella as a brilliant new directing talent in the genre.
Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/02/leviticus-deadly-desire-stalks-queer-teens-in-this-rural-australian-horror/