by Hudson Moura
Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus (Australia, 2026) announces its horror dimension immediately. From its opening sequence, the film establishes an atmosphere of estrangement, suffering, violence, and death, suggesting that something profoundly disturbing inhabits this small and intensely religious Australian town. That presence gradually takes hold of young people, pushing them toward erratic, frightening, and increasingly dangerous behaviour. Yet the film quickly makes clear that the real horror may not reside only in a supernatural force, but in the hatred, repression, and fear already embedded within the community itself.
At the centre of the story are two teenage boys Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) who must escape an entity capable of assuming the form of the person they desire most—each other. This premise gives the film its strongest and most unsettling metaphor: desire itself becomes frightening because it has been taught to them as something dangerous and deadly. The supernatural force does not simply attack the boys physically, it exploits their emotional and sexual vulnerability, transforming attraction into a potential source of death. The recurring idea that “what—or whom—we desire can kill us” becomes central to the film’s psychological horror.
The title Leviticus makes this connection between religion and homosexuality explicit. By invoking the biblical book traditionally associated with the prohibition against sexual relations between men, Chiarella situates the horror directly within a religious discourse that has historically framed same-sex desire as transgression. The film therefore creates a deliberately uncomfortable ambiguity: is the evil presence actually transforming these young men, or has the surrounding religious culture already taught them to perceive their own desires as something evil that must be expelled? This uncertainty is one of the film’s most effective elements.
The presence of a healer or exorcist figure intensifies that ambiguity. His attempts to remove the possessing spirit echo religious practices aimed at purifying the individual of an unwanted force, but they also inevitably recall the language and rituals of conversion therapy. Desire becomes something that the community believes can—or must—be removed.
The film blurs the distinction between supernatural possession and socially imposed repression, suggesting that the most damaging form of possession may be the internalization of a community’s hatred.
This is where Leviticus becomes particularly strong as a psychological horror film. Naim and Ryan gradually begin to fear not only the entity pursuing them, but also their own emotions. Attraction, tenderness, and sexual desire are transformed into sources of anxiety because the boys have learned that these feelings place them in danger. The horror therefore operates simultaneously from outside and within: a supernatural threat pursues them, while religious and social condemnation has already installed fear inside their own minds.
In that respect, the film recalls Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, another Aussie film, which also examines teenage homosexuality within a religious environment. In Boy Erased, however, the violence is explicitly institutional: the son of a Baptist preacher is forced into a church-supported conversion program intended to eradicate his homosexuality. Leviticus translates a comparable mechanism of repression into the language of supernatural horror. Instead of a conversion camp, Chiarella gives us possession, exorcism, and a malevolent entity, turning social and religious homophobia into something literally monstrous.
The most provocative question raised by the film is therefore whether its supernatural horror is internalized. The entity assumes the appearance of whoever produces the strongest emotional or sexual response, converting desire into threat. Yet the film also suggests that this transformation does not originate naturally in desire itself. Rather, the horror is created by a social environment that has taught the boys to associate their feelings with shame, sin, danger, and death.
This is also why the statement that “hate killed the young people” becomes so important. Beneath the supernatural mythology lies a much more recognizable social mechanism. The community’s values enter the teenagers’ consciousness so deeply that desire itself becomes terrifying. Chiarella uses the conventions of horror to visualize the psychological consequences of this repression: the monster is powerful precisely because society has already prepared the boys to believe in it.
As a result, Leviticus works on two levels with unusual efficiency. As a psychological and supernatural horror film, it creates genuine tension through possession, transformation, fear, and the instability of identity and desire. But it is equally effective as a social and political film, using horror to explore how religious condemnation and homophobia can become internalized until they experience their own emotions as something threatening.
Chiarella transforms sexual repression into horror imagery with considerable force, making the film not simply a story about teenagers escaping an evil presence, but about the terrifying consequences of turning desire into sin and difference into something that must be exorcised.
Rating: 4.3/5