The ongoing horror renaissance here brings off something genuinely radical: installing an unabashedly queer chiller at the heart of the multiplex. (Last month's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma felt intrinsically arthouse, and not much of a horror movie in the end; and although certain corners of the Internet might long for it, I still think you have to do a fair bit of critical heavy lifting to draw 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors out of its much-discussed closet.) Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus puts at its centre two gay teenagers attempting to hide their love from their elders in a small industrial town. It's a small Australian industrial town, to be more specific, pulling us back into the rough-and-ready territory of 2022's Talk to Me. As we first join them, young Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and Naim (Joe Bird) are watching a Biblical serpent devour a frog in the fields surrounding their tumbledown home; later, they'll break into one of the area's many abandoned factories to lob stones at one another. They're at the displacement stage of young love, where desire tends to manifest as horseplay and roughhousing - although a full-mouthed kiss, one pinning the other down on the factory floor, would appear to signal this displacement is no more. But this is also, to further specify, a small, predominantly Christian town, which both explains that looming title - Naim's mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) is a big deal in the local revivalist church - and why these boys feel they have to keep their affections secret. Some people out this way would consider such affections unnatural. But they're nothing like as unnatural as what follows: a Judas-like betrayal, a spell in conversion therapy overseen by a steely-eyed Nicholas Hope (from 1993's Bad Boy Bubby) and the emergence of a new threat that turns these boys against one another, once more leaving them feeling watched, judged, hounded.
Leviticus is one of those rare horror films that feels broadly original even as it encompasses elements you may well have encountered elsewhere. Conversion therapy, for one, was central to the recent Oz-shot, US-set streaming title Diabolic; we also get an unexpected revival for that classic expositionary scene in which our harried heroes have to track down a mental patient with close personal knowledge of how their demons operate. Yet Chiarella's assured storytelling takes these staples in its stride, and he's eloquent indeed in his shotmaking. That dreamy prologue, for starters, establishes a wordless contrast between the wide open skies and spaces Ryan and Naim are framed against and the cold, dark houses of God the boys' elders retreat inside; thereafter, an altogether oppressive atmosphere takes hold. Accusatory glances are fired from the pulpit and the pews; the youngsters are penned in by pylons and wires, unable to communicate as they would prefer; and Jed Kurzel's score, scattering unresolved notes and tensions, keeps threatening to fuse with the opening moments of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing". Quite some threat, then, even if the real demons here are shame and self-loathing, threats from within. As a result, Leviticus maybe doesn't have the blunt-force impact of other recent Aussie breakouts, but it's quietly impressive all the same, both as horror and as a film. Chiarella proceeds with a scuffed-up sincerity that manifests wherever you look: in his gripping and unnerving narrative developments, forever rooted in painful human experience; in his largely analogue effects work, specialising in trauma registered on bodies and faces; and in the Gregory Crewdson-like eye DoP Tyson Perkins displays for distressed and dishevelled locations. This shouldn't be the ultimate horror litmus test, but you sense Leviticus would work almost as well without its central supernatural conceit - as a latter-day parable on the evils men are perfectly capable of doing unto themselves.
Leviticus is now showing in selected cinemas.
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