Adrian Chiarella is a writer\/director who came up as a Chinese\/Australian second-generation immigrant. And like so many up-and-coming non-American filmmakers nowadays, Chiarella made his writing\/directing feature debut with a prestige horror flick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leviticus <\/em>lays its scene in some tiny Australian town where nobody has anything better to do than go to church and deface abandoned buildings. More importantly, this particular town has recently seen a disturbing pattern of missing or dead teenagers, and nobody seems particularly keen on investigating further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our protagonist is Naim (which does sound confusingly like “name”), played by Joe Bird. He’s a young man introduced rough-housing with Ryan (Stacy Clausen) until their play-wrestling turns into making out. Like you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matters are complicated when Naim catches Ryan making out with Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), who happens to be the son of the local pastor (Rod, played by Ewen Leslie). In a jealous rage, Naim rats them out to Rod, who in turn summons the Deliverance Healer (Nicholas Hope). It’s all downhill from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we’ve got here is a Smile<\/em>\/It Follows<\/em> kind of scenario, in which our characters are cursed to be relentlessly hunted down by a malevolent spirit in disguise. The kicker is that this particular spirit takes the guise of the victim’s most ardent crush, and it only acts when the victim acts on their romantic\/sexual desires for said crush. Which means that whenever the victim and his crush cross paths, there’s little way of knowing whether it’s the actual person or the killer in disguise. This in turn means that the victim would steadily be conditioned to avoid their crush and deny their impulses at all costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s ingeniously effective as an allegory for conversion therapy or living as a closeted homosexual. It might even be an effective AIDS allegory. And for a shoestring budget horror flick, the conceit is diabolically clever as an effective way of getting kills and scares at a low cost. Even better, precisely because the monster only strikes in response to affection, there’s a fatal suspense underlying every intimate scene and sex scene in a way that I’ve never seen done before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On another level, this particular monster could be symbolic of guilt. Obviously, religion and guilt go hand-in-hand, particularly when “sinful behavior” is involved. But with Naim in particular, this is on a whole ‘nother level. Because if Naim hadn’t gotten so jealous and ratted out Ryan and Hunter for no reason at all, none of this would’ve happened. Everything awful that happens is a morbid reminder of Naim’s betrayal. That said, it’s possible that everyone’s secrets would’ve been discovered in some other way and everything would’ve played out the same regardless. More importantly, the Deliverance Healer and his monster have clearly been at this for a while and all that blood is ultimately on their hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The local pastor himself is made to reckon with that after he calls the Deliverance Healer on his own son. I’m loathe to spoil what happens — and I’m rather disappointed that the film itself glosses over this point — but we see for ourselves that the town’s religious leaders are all fire and brimstone until they take a dose of their own medicine. Yet the townsfolk refuse to admit that they’ve been had, and they find some way to blame the sinners instead. Even as those same sinners are running for their lives from the curse that these same religious idiots inflicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is most clearly demonstrated by Naim’s mother. Granted, Arlene (Exec Producer Mia Wasikowska) is stuck in the unenviable position of working as a single mother to a closeted teenage boy, and Naim’s story is admittedly tough to believe. Even so, Arlene consistently and repeatedly insists that she and her religious cult know better than Naim. It’s not that Arlene doesn’t care about her son, it’s that she’s become so thoroughly indoctrinated that Arlene has surrendered her own judgment, delegating her own welfare and that of her son to the local religious leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At one point, Arlene gets a line as intriguing as it is bone-chilling, pointing out that fear is good because it keeps us alive. What’s interesting is that she never elaborates on exactly what kind of fear. Fear of predators? Fear of God? Fear of sin? Fear of our parents? Fear of ourselves and our impulses and our psychological chemistry? At what point does fear become too much of a good thing and one’s life is destroyed through obsessive paranoia?<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this feeds directly back into the conversion therapy allegory, from another angle. Remember, Naim is a teenage boy with no reason to believe his mother means him any harm, and he’s got nobody else to go to. Yet he can’t even trust his own mother to do what’s best for him. He can’t tell his mother anything, for fear that she’ll delude herself into thinking that turning against him is for his own good. And remember, we’re talking about religious leaders who are directly responsible for the deaths of other kids his age. The very thought of Naim’s own mother going to these same psychopaths for help — over the begging and pleading and screaming of her own son — is unthinkably awful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So are there any nitpicks? Well, it bears repeating that Rod’s reaction to the curse on his son happens pretty much entirely offscreen, more could have and should have been done with that. More importantly, there’s the issue of the monster’s major weakness, that doesn’t get discovered until the climax. It irks me that this particular weakness has no thematic relevance and makes zero sense in the context of the greater allegory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the film gets away with it, because (1) it ties back into the cursing ritual in a clever way, and (2) the film makes it perfectly clear that this is only a stopgap. It offers a glimmer of hope that our victim pool could survive to the end of the movie, which makes for a far more suspenseful watch. I respect a horror movie that doesn’t treat the characters’ fates as a foregone conclusion and allows some way for the protagonist to actually get what they want — too many horror movies pre-emptively end themselves because we know there’s no way they could survive. More importantly, the film makes it perfectly clear that the curse and its resulting trauma will continue to haunt these characters for the rest of their lives, no matter how hard they try to fight it, and that’s far more relevant to the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus<\/em> is just the way I like my prestige horror: Lean and mean. At only 88 minutes long, this one is all killer and no filler. Even if there were perhaps a few times when a bit more filler might’ve helped to smooth out the themes and plot. That said, this is undeniably a harrowing and ingenious conversion therapy allegory that will hopefully give the straight folk something to think about while giving the queer folk some representation they can be proud of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m happy to recommend this for a big screen viewing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lean and mean<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":734,"featured_media":13730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5188,4396,5189,393,5187],"class_list":["post-13726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-jeremy-blewitt","tag-joe-bird","tag-leviticus","tag-mia-wasikowska","tag-stacy-clausen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PXL_20260628_064503745-scaled-e1782629815569.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3uOb3-3zo","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13726"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13731,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13726\/revisions\/13731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviecuriosities.fmuk.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}