Leviticus is a horror film directed by Adrian Chiarella and is an unsettling and deeply disturbing commentary on being gay in Australia. It explores religious trauma, queer repression and internalised homophobia and is ultimately an allegory for the realities of gay conversion therapy.
The Aussie film is set in a highly religious unnamed rural steel town and filmed in various regional Victorian places such as Ballarat, Bacchus Marsh, Werribee and Geelong. Chiarella uses the vast landscapes to create a sense of isolation and present a bleak, monotonous atmosphere which serves as the perfect backdrop for the story to unfold in. It’s an indie film and Chiarella’s feature debut as a director, originally premiering at Sundance Film Festival.
Before I get too in depth with this one, I just want to say I’m in awe of how well Chiarella manages to keep his audience hopeful for a happily ever after despite the genre. It also only seems fair to warn those of us who aren’t so good with horror or gore that this beautifully crafted film WILL make you jump. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever physically flinched as hard as I did while watching Leviticus, which is saying a lot coming from someone as averse to horror as myself. Strap in for this one, there are so many important and often generally overlooked topics to consider when talking about this movie.
The title of this film by itself holds a lot of weight, it gives a fair bit of pre context to the general concept of the story being told. Leviticus is the third book in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Verses from this book are historically taken out of context and twisted in order to condemn queer relationships.
For the sake of this discussion, consider it an instruction manual for how to maintain a holy community in the eyes of God. To be ‘holy’ is to be clean and pure, to be clean and pure is atone for one’s sins and live as God intends. The book of Leviticus also contains a lot of ritual sacrifice, which can be quite obviously connected to the deaths that occur in the film.
Another easy comparison to make is the townspeople and the deadly entity which carries out the aforementioned sacrifices throwing things at the main characters, namely stones and frog carcasses mid-dissection. This is a direct reference to Leviticus 20:13, which sets stoning as the atonement for ‘men lying with men’.
Being set in a religious town gives this story about homophobia and prejudice a certain creeping air of unsafety to begin with, but populating said town with both classic bogan types and Christian extremists accentuates that vibe. It’s a small, oppressive rural town which opposes anything it deems as an ‘other’ in its population.
The cast does a wonderful job of capturing this collective rejection and disgust, it truly seemed so authentic and I felt that it reflected lived experiences of people and communities like this so perfectly. There’s a deep-rooted systemic complicity in this place, to the extent that even the police attempt to coerce the queer teens into abandoning their identities, even going so far as to out one of them.
The movie follows our main characters Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and their raw, sweet, budding romance. My favourite part of Leviticus was watching these two fall in love, their chemistry on screen is palpable and the scenes in which they’re together have such a warm and intimate feeling to them. These two face a lot of awful situations together, and it only seems to bring them closer together.
One of the most poignant issues the young couple faces is that the town they reside in is of course as previously stated, extremely homophobic. After discovering that three teenage boys had been exploring their queer sexualities, the church’s “deliverance healer” is called to intervene. He performs a deeply cruel sort of ritual on the boys, which causes them to convulse painfully, vomit, and then attaches the monster and main threat of the film to them. This ritual is an attempt to ‘fix’ or exorcise the teenagers, and serves as a direct metaphor for gay conversion therapy. In order to establish stakes, tension and danger, two deaths directly related to this monster occur quite early on.
The deadly creature is not visible to anyone other than the person it’s haunting and it only appears when that person is alone. To that individual, it takes the form of the person they desire the most, and uses this form to lull them into a false sense of security before striking.
The more they interact with the real person in question, the more accurate the monster is able to impersonate them and the stronger and more dangerous it becomes. This makes the situation both Naim and Ryan find themselves in so much more dangerous, as they can’t seem to stay away from each other no matter how many times they get hurt. As the film progresses we see the couple go from curious, carefree and incredibly sweet exploration of sexuality to traumatised, hesitant to express affection and effectively stripped of their authentic, carefree identities.
Leviticus is a horror entrenched in reality. For such an unimaginable creature to serve as the catalyst for the deaths and religious persecution of this film, it shouldn’t have the effect that it does. It shouldn’t portray the very real tone of leering, imposing, violent hatred so thoroughly, and yet it does. This is such a well crafted, moving story and it does a wonderful job of being sinister and terrifying at every turn. Not once did I feel like the issues it was taking on were trivialised in any way, which is so impressive, again, due to the outlandish threat of the film.
As scared as I was I loved this movie, I loved this world, I loved the characters within this world and I simply couldn’t recommend it enough. If this piques your interest at all I implore you to go watch it.
