By Matthew Moorcroft

Strong Recommendation

• Directed by Adrian Chiarella
• Starring Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Jeremy Blewitt, Mia Wasikowska
• R

Seduction and the fear of desire are something that are intrinsically linked in horror and have been for some time. While the reasons are mostly socially – mainly the advent of puritan culture and conservatism in regards to sexuality – it has meant that horror has always that seductive background to many of it’s stories. It’s such a key part of most horror stories that many of them feast on it as part of their main course, like Possession or most tellings of Dracula.

Using those tropes to devastatingly sad results, Leviticus offers up instead a vision of horror where the fear isn’t the actual seducing itself, but the horror is in that you might actually want it. After all, if you are in a small town where everybody knows everybody, you don’t want to upset the established order that this Christian community has made for itself. Nothing out of the norm, nothing unholy or unpure. Those sinful thoughts must be feared, be purged, be ignored. Repression is key.

This is the situation that our lead character, Naim, finds himself in. He’s moved into this town after the death of his father and his mother becoming more devout in her faith as a way to cope. Naim hates himself, or at least hates his feelings and is scared of them, mostly wanting to keep it hidden down where nobody, not even himself, can see it. But feelings always find their way back up, especially when they’ve been buried for some time, and with a fury those feelings return in a more violent, terrifying way.

As a debut feature, Leviticus does everything right, even if it’s a little purposeful broad in it’s strokes. Both Joe Bird and Stacy Caulsen have magnetic chemistry with each other, both in their more tense, emotional confrontations but also the small moments of happiness that they do manage to get in within the bleak, oppressive atmosphere that permeates the entire picture. While Leviticus is never completely horrifying or scary, it’s certainly filled with dread, mainly at the inevitability. Some of the flick’s most dire, tense sequences aren’t even the result of the film’s supernatural entity stalking our leads, but instead the small moments of rejection from parents, ridicule from classmates, a beatdown from homophobes. The town is a prison, and the entity is just a manifestation of something that is already happening.

But it’s that sadness and beating heart to the picture that ends up giving Leviticus it’s real bite and weight. It’s a shockingly romantic picture in spite of the gnarly horror that it sometimes portrays, especially as the third act ramps up the gore and nastiness factor. Both Bird and Caulsen’s tenderness are matched by the softer tones that Leviticus goes for in it’s frames and images; despite the dark tone, this is a much softer looking film then you would expect, but it’s that contrast that ultimately serves to highlight the otherwise cruel tactics of the fundamentalists here. If anybody is perverting a natural beauty, it’s those that seek to surpress the natural out of fear of the unknown.

I suspect Leviticus will have bite and weight far beyond that of it’s initial release, especially as we head into a time of increasing uncertainty surrounding the rights of LGBTQ+ people and the growing, continued rise of Christian nationalism throughout English speaking countries. But Leviticus calls out a shared cry of pain for those that have to hide their identities out of fear. Fear of persecution, fear of rejection, fear of not being wanted. Leviticus argues there is nothing scarier then being alone with your thoughts and nobody to comfort you, and there is truth to that, especially for somebody like myself who Leviticus resonated with deeply. It’s not a perfect picture – it’s a little too broad and has a real “first feature” feeling about it – but it’s certainly one of the year’s most delicately produced pictures and one of it’s most urgent. Highly recommend.