★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
The tagline alone hooks you: Two star-crossed teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most—each other.
Hoo-boy! The queer horror of “Leviticus” isn’t new, but it hits a raw nerve in this time of a new resistance to LGBTQ rights. Some have called the film “It Follows” meets “Heated Rivalry.” But it goes deeper than that. To the fresh voices in the scare genre this year, leading with Curry Barker (“Obsession”) and Kane Parsons (“Backrooms”), add Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella. Titled after the book in the Bible that calls homosexuality an abomination, “Leviticus” is a visceral fright fest with a lot on its mind. The demon in this case being conversion therapy.
Joe Bird excels as Naim, a teen who’s just moved to an isolated Australian backwater at the insistence of his troubled mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska, sweet and sinister). Hanging around a deserted mill, Naim meets Ryan (a sensational Stacy Clausen), a blond hottie who starts rough-housing with the new kid. Bullying? For Ryan, it’s a quick way to make contact. After pinning Naim to the ground, he kisses him, hard then tender. Naim responds but pulls away, sensing that being open will lead to persecution in this small, small-minded town ruled by the Christian right.
The spinetingling take on sex and the supernatural wants to keep us up nights. And damn, it knows how.
Chiarella salutes queer history on film by calling out a key scene in Jean Genet’s erotic 1950 landmark “Un Chant d’Amour,” in which two prisoners express their yearning for each other through a shared wall. For Ryan and Naim it’s between a screen door, and the actors make the heat and the heart of the moment palpable.
At school, Ryan is suddenly distant to keep up a false façade. That doesn’t last long, especially when Niam betrays Ryan after catching him hitting on Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), the pastor’s son.
That prompts the church to jump into action, bringing in a “deliverance healer,” played with creepy exactitude by Nicholas Hope. That dude is not content to “pray the gay away.” Enter the violent entity that will make itself look at the other’s heart’s desire. Queue the convulsions and the brutal punishments. Something bad really is happening in Oz.
Clausen does wonders fooling us about when and if the entity is really inside Ryan. I started ducking every time I saw him. After becoming invested in the first love between the two boys, we must also watch them constantly looking for the presence of the entity who can do them and those nearby incalculable harm.
Chiarella doesn’t skimp on showing the evil the entity can perform. But “Leviticus” is less interested in shock value than in shaking the hold fear can have of us when we bow to the combined pressures of church and state instead of what we really feel inside. Isolation isn’t the answer for Niam and Ryan; togetherness is. The hopeful ending is still shadowed by all the forms that fear takes if we let it. The spinetingling “Leviticus,” with its provocative take on sex and the supernatural,” wants to keep us up nights. And damn, it knows how.