Director: Adrian Chiarella
Stars: Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska, Joe Bird
Power lines crackle overhead in an unnamed industrial town in the Australian state of Victoria, indicative of unseen forces holding sway over the communities that live there. One such community is a devout cluster of Christian families. From among their number we focus in on teenage boys Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) whose roughhousing in one of the suburb’s many abandoned factories develops into a heady sexual embrace. Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut – after a string of shorts and TV jobs – chronicles the upsets and pitfalls of a queer coming-of-age tale, but chooses supernatural horrors to reflect the dangerous and bigoted values of the God-fearing folk who surround the burgeoning couple.
There’s a lot about Leviticus to like and admire, particularly in the work from the two young leads. Chiarella’s script ribs Naim early for his bundle of extant fears, from snakes to heights, but his fearfulness stems more from the mixture of feelings that are generated in him by Ryan; a bad-boy type who generates an arousal that doesn’t tessellate with his religious upbringing and the buttoned down mannerisms of his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska). Bird’s depiction of this inner confusion is heart-rending without tipping over into the histrionic. Clausen impressively underplays, almost shrugging off his part. It’s only in the second half of the film that this choice is mined for paranoiac potential and the actor’s ability to suddenly and scarily turn on a dime.
As a misguided attempt at intervention, the community’s gay children are subjected to a kind of ritualistic conversion therapy performed by a so-called ‘Deliverance Healer’ (Nicholas Hope) whose methods sit somewhere between hypnotism and the shamanistic. Arlene may be fearful of homophobic violence against Naim, but by delivering him into the hands of the Deliverance Healer she is subjecting him to another kind of violence, against his nature. Having been ‘cleansed’ the boys are stalked by an entity unseen to others but which takes on the form of their dearest crush. Violent and even murderous, this entity is a kind of threatening aversion therapy, breaking down notions of trust and intimacy.
Like the Philippous before him, Chiarella isn’t afraid of going all-out when a threat arises, but also tempers this instinct in order to protect the film’s tender heart. The middle-ground is effective if occasionally frustrating. A fake-out dream-within-a-dream is the most annoying example of this; a cheap trick that is beneath the rest of the movie’s more nuanced abilities, something that feels added to sate some external mandate or expectation. Leviticus is far more successful at mining suspicion over it’s potential doppelgangers. A scene in which Naim cautiously approaches ‘Ryan'(?) at a mesh door deliberately evokes a visual simile to the confession booth. It’s fitting for a scene both queasily suspenseful and confessional.
But there’s a colossal elephant in the room here that I’ve gone too long without addressing. As admirable and effective as many elements of the film are, it is consumed by the shadow of it’s clear influence; David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 cult indie hit It Follows. There’s almost no avoiding the similarities here, because they aren’t limited to narrative inspiration (the plot follows the beats of Mitchell’s film almost to the letter).
So many of the aesthetic choices here are the same, from the framing and lighting used to create a similar sense of liminal, perpetual twilight, to veteran musician Jed Kurzel’s sinuous, synthetic-sounding score which sounds for all the world like a concerted effort to imitate the work of Disasterpiece. The setting is another slowly dilapidating suburbia of factories suggestive of a rot in the country’s values. A swimming pool plays a major part in a key sequence. And we’re firmly in the territory of sexual awakening as an entry point to mortality and the complexities of trust in others. Leviticus is so It Follows that it undermines itself. The shadow is inescapable and ultimately consuming. As imitations go, it’s a semi-remarkable one with plenty to offer all of it’s own, and if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. But it does feel like outright theft.
Kudos again to Bird and Clausen for their efforts in spite of this. Haunted by the phantoms of forbidden lust, they have the potential to become avatars of romanticism for a generation of gay horror hounds. There’s a temptation to view Gen Z and beyond through rose-tinted glasses. That their acceptance of sexuality and gender as a spectrum will result in a more understanding world to flourish in. Chiarella’s film warns that this is not the case, and that it is not just generational dissonance and bias providing the red flags. He also taps acutely into innate fears in all of us that our partners could turn. Of domestic violence. The ending – also borrowed from It Follows – isn’t a simplistic solution but the reconciliation that some threats, like death, are inescapable and have to be lived with, and it’s about who you chose to have at your side to battle on.
Like I say, all laudable work, well executed. It’s just a shame how glaringly – how detrimentally – we’ve been here before.
The Lost Highway Hotel 