Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus cannot be described as anything other than a triumph of both Australian independent cinema and our country’s underground queer cinematic tradition.
Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival before going on to play In Competition at the recent Sydney Film Festival, Leviticus follows two rural Victorian gay boys, Naim and Ryan, who are both forced to undergo a traumatising baptism by their religious community so that they might become heterosexual. The baptism backfires, and the pair begin to be stalked by an invisible beast who will follow them to the ends of the Earth in order to destroy them.
While such a fantastical and horrific premise might cause one to dismiss the film as a work of melodrama, Chiarella approaches his film with delicacy and nuance and manages to craft a film that is indescribably profound that studies the cross section of queerness and horror in a delightfully new way. Instead of making the same mistakes as many making queer horror, his film’s monster is not a trite metaphor for societal homophobia, but is instead a manifestation of his protagonists’ own repressed identity and internalised homophobia.
Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen—who play Naim and Ryan, respectively—are magnificent as the film’s leads, and are especially talented at communicating Chiarella’s complex queer subtext. Bird plays Naim as an anxious outsider unable to pursue his desires due to his repressed nature, and Clausen portrays Ryan with a markedly heterosexual masculine bravado, that highlights immediately his own internalised hatred of his queer identity.
The film’s use of its rural Victorian location is stunning, allowing the country and terrain to seem peaceful and idyllic in one moment and eerie and harsh in the next, in many ways mirroring the relationship between Naim and Ryan. The cinematography makes great use of shadow to force the audience to share in the boys’ terror of an unseeable unknown, and the film’s sound design will keep your heart rate high through a plethora of creepy ambient noises contrasted with sudden harsh and confronting jump scares.
Leviticus is both one of the most terrifying films of the year and one of the most profoundly heartfelt, and will resonate with all in its study of the importance of authentic personal expression and the dangers that come with its suppression.
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