Leviticus

A masterclass in queer horror! Adrian Chiarella brilliantly subverts the conversion therapy trope by turning the "cleansing" ritual into a living, shape-shifting nightmare. The entity taking the shape of what the boys desire most—each other—is a devastatingly poetic metaphor. Tyson Perkins’ gorgeous, bleak cinematography of rural Australia makes every frame feel loaded with dread. It’s atmospheric, deeply romantic, and utterly heartbreaking.

If you have seen It Follows, then a lot of the beats of this movie will be familiar to you. This movie, however, is better than It Follows because it gives a context as to why it happens. The characters therefore become more relatable and the tension becomes more grounded than the jump scares of It Follows. The cast in this movie are doing a great job, and the director is doing fantastically. The effects are well produced and the indifference of certain side characters heighten the sense of abandonment that the characters suffer through. It's a good watch.

There is something really quite horrific about this story, but it's not so much that we have anything going bump in the night - it's that a community's solution to two lads caught in a clinch is to subject them to something akin to an exorcism. "Ryan" (Stacy Clausen) is the hunky, tousled blond lad who has been becoming closer to "Naim" (Joe Bird). The latter lad appears much more impressionable and in pretty distraught when he finds his new-found love messing about with "Hunter" (Jeremy Blewitt) in his backyard. Desolate, he reports him to his parents. Their solution is to bring in a creepy "deliverance healer" (Nicholas Hope) who waves a cigarette lighter around for a while, quotes some distinctly ropey scripture, and then pronounes the boys cured! Except, well his definition of cure actually releases a malevolent spirit into their lives that adopts the appearance of the other and that will stop at nothing to destroy him. Initially, the boys have no idea that this menace is out to get them, but after a fearsomely violent encounter leads to tragedy, "Naim" finds his mother has signed him up for the same treatment - ostensibly to keep him safe. Hmmm - what chance now he and "Ryan" can tell friend from foe and stop it before it stops one of them? There are two really quite engaging performances here and what's more the pared-back style of the production does much of the heavy lifting without the need for special effects that the limited budget would never have been able to deliver adequately. Much of the sense of peril here is left to our own imagination and to some clever use of the photography to often quite menacingly juxtapose the camera and the characters - sometimes leaving us as uncertain as them as to who is who/real. It's quite a sad critique of small-town mentalities and of their reliance on religiosity to avoid facing what is real in the lives of their own offspring who just happen to be different from them, and though it could perhaps have spent a little more time developing the personas a bit more, it has an intimacy to it and is well worth ninety minutes as horror, like beauty, proves to be very much in the eye of the beholder.