The first half of this year has seen some exciting lightning bolt films from newer, younger, less experienced cinematic voices.
These films include “Backrooms,” “Hokum,” “Obsession,” “Exit Eight,” and “The Drama,” all of which have made their own respective marks at the box office. Whether comedies or dramas, these new releases have a persistent darkness in them, tapping into current anxieties of isolation, emotional confinement, yearning for human connection, and the obtuse forces of technology.
A new release we can add to this growing trend of dark and spooky creativity is the Australian independent drama “Leviticus,” written and directed by Adrian Chiarella.
“Leviticus” is this man's first feature-length film, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year.
Leviticus starts out as a tender coming of age story when two teenage boys start secretly exploring their attraction with each other, fumbling through kisses and gropes, but when the boys' secret infatuation is exposed, their budding love story turns deadly.
A strange church leader shows up and performs an ominous religious ritual on each boy to cleanse them of their sinful urges. This ritual unleashes a demonic force, stalking the boys every day and taking the form of the person each boy desires most, and that force gets violent.
What starts out as a contemporary tale of forbidden queer love takes a vicious turn into a supernatural horror story of queer survival.
In the 2015 book by David Thompson, “How to Watch a Movie,” he writes, “film wants us to see momentary things. It wants to show us something we have never seen before and may not see again.”
This quote is why “Leviticus” is so successfully unnerving and memorable. It's something viewers have not seen before, a haunting, barbed metaphor of gay conversion therapy.
Shooting this film in small town Australia helps remind viewers that conversion therapy still happens in many different forms today, and it exists all over the world, not just in the expected Christian and Western places.
This high concept premise of an unexplained demonic entity could so easily be overwritten, confusing, or inauthentic, but the direct, honest performances from the two leading actors are so simple, so fragile, and so realistic. This film will have you on the edge of your seat.
The actors' realistic performances, mixing hope, fear, betrayal, and frustration, will connect with anyone watching, regardless of sexual labels. “Leviticus” combines the struggles of young gay identity, like in “Boy Erased” from 2018 with the abstract terror of “It Follows” from 2014.
Such an inventive premise in this film makes gay longing something dangerous. Any expression of love could end up harming you. Shame follows you like a ghost. The frightening moments of jump scares and bloody attacks are believable, but they aren't that scary to me.
What remains most effective in this is the psychological dread, the quietly continuous threat of attack. “Leviticus” paints its physical settings in deceptively bleak colors, echoing the bleak internal landscapes of the two leading boys trying to figure out how to live safely.
At only one hour and 28 minutes, it's an incredibly succinct piece of horror filmmaking, and I highly recommend it to everyone.
How can gay people survive oppressive forces meant to hurt them and separate them? Maybe the best way to survive is to stick together.
For Flix at 48 I'm Casey T. Allen.
