Joel on Film

It’s not so much that the concept driving Leviticus that terrifies one to the core but the way writer/director Adrian Chiarella’s debut constantly teases its own terror via unexpected filmmaking flourishes. Take the first time we notice that something is very, very wrong here, in which the first of two protagonists in this story sees his friend and secret lover confronting an unseen person from afar. Actually, that moment is the second time we’ve seen the friend do this, but the first was so quick, so intimate and so upsetting that we were focused on the part of it that, we believed, was the upsetting part.

Once the second confrontation happens, though, we understand the game Chiarella is playing with us, and it’s an utterly diabolical, thoroughly commendable and conceptually brilliant move on his part. The moment is subversive in the extreme, especially for the horror genre—into which this firmly plants its feet, with its romantic angle coming second—because we have a built-in set of expectations. We expect, when we’re being introduced to the concept of a horror movie, that the movie will just throw its concept at us as a typically devised scenario in which the filmmaker is telling us that they mean business.

This one even recalls in some of its concepts and themes a modern midnight-movie classic from a little more than a decade ago, in which a curse was passed by sexual contact and manifests itself as another human being. The point of this review, of course, is not necessarily to compare the two movies on any other level, but given that the two concepts are so similar, it does beg the superficial comparison. Here, the idea is, perhaps, even more frightening, because there’s no possibility of seeing a stranger lumber toward you, when the curse manifests this time around as the person whom the intended victim desires the most.

For Naim (Joe Bird), that person is Ryan (Stacy Clausen), and as the both of them are older teenagers at the will of fundamentalist parents in an extreme religious sect under the control of a pastor with the loaded name of Rod (Ewen Leslie), both deem it wise to keep their budding attraction toward and affection for each other on the down-low. Naim is a recent convert, though he doesn’t place his trust in Rod or the group’s deliverance healer (played by Nicholas Hope) quite as much as his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska). Both of them get a crash course in the group’s fiercely held beliefs, though, when Ryan and another student, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), are “healed” in a way that seems alarmingly and forbiddingly violent.

Yes, this is assuredly a cautionary tale of sorts in which the morally reprehensible practice known as “conversion therapy” (though it provides no therapy for nor converts anything within people) is the target of a sort of allegory. The film is quite pointed in the ways it incorporates some of its imagery to bring that process to mind, especially because the effect upon the body could easily stand in for the process of electrically shocking the victims of such therapy. We also acknowledge that the stakes in each boy’s personal relationships are quite akin to those relayed in real stories of such practices and their effects.

Arlene, for instance, does sort of a bad job pretending that she doesn’t know the extent to which Naim is being mistreated within the walls of this place, though she does eventually reveal her intentions—which, because the film is smartly written and does not boil down the characters to be obvious heroes or villains, are rooted in something as utterly sad as it is misguided. Without spoiling too much, let’s only say that the relationship is fractured and a whisper of what it might once have been, practically destroyed by the absence of Naim’s father but unable, because of the mother’s newfound fundamentalism, to find some foothold in peace. The movie doesn’t quite dig into the dynamics of this relationship, almost by nature, though Wasikowska is good here in the limited but impactful screen time she gets.

If the film shortchanges a few of its storytelling avenues, that could be explained by its dedication to the central relationship, and Bird and Clausen are both strong enough in their portrayals of uncertain youth, complicated by supernatural matters of a horrifying kind. It’s also why the beginning of this review was so adamant about its true intentions as an exercise in its genre. This movie is quite, quite scary, in ways that run deeper than the superficial shock of the gruesome violence.

Chiarella builds toward the horror here, particularly proud of the way he stages and executes the scenes in which an entity, possessing both Naim and Ryan at any given point, follows with an unblinking stare or, upon capturing its prey, throttles its victim at the neck before exacting appalling violence upon their person. That’s why the first brush with this concept is so unsettling: We see it from afar, from a third-person perspective and only in part, on account of some objects hiding the nature of the entity. He appears as the victim’s besotted, but only to that victim, whereas to everyone else it’s an empty space.

This idea guides the entire film through its horror trappings, including a stalk-and-kill climax that’s as cleverly devised as it is genuinely suspenseful. Leviticus works well enough as an allegory, but it flourishes in more carnal ways.

Rating: *** (out of ****)