The Next Obsession Is Already Here, but Its Subject Is Quite a Bit More Controversial

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Heads in Hollywood’s horror film community must be spinning faster than that of the little girl in The Exorcist. The unprecedented summer success of Obsession and Backrooms, two original movies from young filmmakers with modest budgets, has proven audiences’ appetite for fresh new viewpoints that are as unique as they are haunting, rather than the recycled franchise fare that studios have been shoving down our throats for years now. Poised to join the recent slew of indie horror delights is one more contender: Leviticus, a film from Australia that’s been generating big word-of-mouth buzz online since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was picked up for distribution by Neon.

Like Obsession, Leviticus is interested in what happens when we finally land the object of our affections—and what can then go disastrously wrong. But where the chaos in Obsession is squarely the fault of its male protagonist, who forces his desire onto an unwilling host, the horrors in Leviticus ultimately come not from the lovers or their yearning, but as a result of those around them. Naim (Joe Bird, who made his debut at just 14 in the 2022 Aussie horror film Talk to Me) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are two teenage boys who live in drab rural Australia, where powerlines hum incessantly and people dressed solely in shades of taupe worship in churches built of cinderblocks. Theirs is the kind of town where you have to make your own fun, and the boys do: exploring decaying buildings, getting high, and falling in love with each other. Naim, skinnier and shyer than the toned and cherubic blond Ryan, moved to the town because his struggling mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) is in search of community and order, which she finds in the uptight world of strict evangelicalism.

Like in HBO’s Half Man, in the world of Leviticus, young men attracted to each other generally frame their desires through violence: In the movie, two lovers throw rocks at each other before kissing, while Naim and Ryan only finally permit themselves to embrace after wrestling. But the real violence comes when an act of betrayal brings the boys’ queerness to the attention of the town’s residents, who call in a “deliverance healer” to perform a form of conversion therapy in the form of a religious ritual. “All your lust, all your indecency, all your desire, it has to go now,” says the preacher. Suddenly, Naim and Ryan are haunted by an initially unseen force that scratches and claws at them whenever they’re seemingly left alone with their thoughts, lifting them in the air by their throats, and ripping at their flesh. Eventually, we see that, in an act of cruel irony, the entity has actually taken the form of the thing the boys desire most: each other. When Naim looks at his supernatural tormentor, he sees the face of his beloved Ryan, and vice versa.

It’s a genius conceit, leaving the boys never quite sure if they can trust one another—is this the real Ryan or his monstrous double? Ultimately, it becomes clear that they can’t really trust anyone else, either, having been failed or betrayed by practically everyone around them, from police officers to shopkeepers to Naim’s own mother. Arlene tells her son that the ritual is intended to save him from a life where he might fall prey to anti-gay violence—not caring, or perhaps even realizing, that she is inflicting violence herself.

Leviticus isn’t a fun scary movie, in the manner of Obsession or Backrooms, and its moments of queer intimacy are likely to keep certain homophobic fanboys away. But its premise is unique enough, its subject matter is sufficiently powerful, and its lead performances are both suitably compelling, that it marks another worthy addition to what has been a remarkable year for horror. The film’s real terror lies not in jumpscares and gore—although it does indulge in it on occasion, like when we say goodbye to someone’s ear—but in the realization that, as with the nature of human sexuality, there is no real way to defeat attraction. There is no “winning” for the boys, who can’t help but be drawn to each other in moments of lust or tenderness despite the dangers. “It comes for you when you’re alone,” one girl who had previously undergone the ritual before the boys tells them. “You can’t make it stop. Nothing will make it stop.”

This feels especially resonant, considering the queer themes of much of the horror genre—from the early films from James Whale to Nightmare on Elm Street 2 to Scream—as writer and director Adrian Chiarella states in press notes accompanying the film. “We are so drawn to horror movies because we’re watching not just the heroes in these films be terrorized by monsters, but there’s also this sense of what it means to be the monster,” Chiarella says. “What it means to be demonized and to be pushed to the fringes of society.”

Being able to discern this subtext is what transforms Leviticus (so named for the book of the Bible that calls homosexuality an abomination) from an ordinary horror flick to something uniquely enjoyable—beautiful, even. The shaman’s conversion-therapy ritual, which turns from hokey to suddenly terrifying, hinges on accepting religion as reality and homosexuality as some demonic force within the boys that is being expelled—or, at least, that’s what the adults around the two lovers want them to think. But there is nothing inherently wrong with Naim or Ryan, as the film—and particularly its opening scenes of stolen glances giving way to stolen kisses—makes clear. Their love story initially plays out like any other. What finally creates the terror in Leviticus is the fundamentalism around them, which is inflicted on the boys and turns something beautiful into something monstrous. It’s not their attraction to each other that’s intrinsically scary; it’s how they’re taught to feel about it.