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[This story contains spoilers for Leviticus.]
Leviticus writer-director Adrian Chiarella sensed a shift in the world’s acceptance and tolerance toward the LGBTQIA+ community. From rights rollbacks to the return of inflammatory rhetoric, the Australian filmmaker decided to write something that could potentially help people better understand the experience of a queer teenager facing homophobia and the threat of conversion therapy.
Partially based on his own experiences with institutionalized bigotry, Chiarella crafted his feature directorial debut, Leviticus, a horror romance in which two Australian teenage boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), are subjected to a ritual that weaponizes their attraction for one another. An entity stalks them and hurts them more and more if they don’t stay away from each other, and the added rub is that the malevolent force takes on their respective appearances. As a result, they constantly question whether the Naim or Ryan in front of them is the genuine article.
Getting into spoilers, Naim and his widowed mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska), only recently moved to the small religious factory town that introduced Naim and Ryan. The rural Australia setting allowed Arlene to dive deeper into her newfound faith following the death of her husband. When she catches wind of Naim’s fondness for Ryan, she recruits the same “deliverance healer” that already cursed Ryan.
