Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

People often go too far when striving for goodness. Their strict moral code drives them to live within a very narrow box, restricting themselves and everyone around them too much. Instead of creating a gentle world, they create an environment of shame and punishment that may meet their moral standards but is far from good.

That’s the kind of environment Leviticus takes place in, although our main character doesn’t realize it at first. Teenage Naim (Joe Bird) knows the small town his mother moved them to is religious. People center church in their life, dragging their kids to long gatherings and encouraging socializing within their insular group. It’s not overtly threatening, but it is intense, and Naim knows he shouldn’t divulge that he’s gay to his mother or the group. Luckily, another boy in town, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), feels the same way and is hot, so in private, their relationship takes off with ease. That is, until Naim sees Ryan with the son of the town preacher and angrily turns them in. He expected the boys to get in big trouble, but he underestimated the town. Instead of traditional punishment, they call in a mysterious healer who attaches a viscous entity to all three of them.

There’s a lot of the 2014 film It Follows in Leviticus, right down to the entity being an invisible-to-everyone-else humanoid figure that’s hard to discern from a regular person. Much like its predecessor, Leviticus derives most of its horror from that looming threat, peddling less in jump scares and more in relentless unease (although it does have one doozy of a jump scare).

Writer/director Adrian Chiarella pairs this brilliantly with the muted backdrop of a rundown town, which serves as its own relentless trap that Naim and Ryan seem unable to escape from. Without much to do, they wander among the town’s abandoned buildings, which are largely relics of a bygone industrial era that’ve been left to rot. Forget about questioning how the adults in the town make a living. What are Naim and Ryan supposed to do when they are their parents’ age and the only thing left in town is the church?

Their place there is untenable even without their queerness. With it in the mix, the threat of not having a future is accelerated. And so Chiarella makes Leviticus’ commentary blatant, with the entity acting out the people’s viciousness and the town reflecting their moral decay. 

The entity itself is even more overt. It takes the form of whoever the person desires most, turning the boys’ love for each other against them. Chiarella uses the conceit to yank his audience back and forth. He makes the scenes between the real boys tender, warm, and impossible not to root for. But when one turns out to be the monster, things get violent very fast. Bird and Clausen play up the dynamic beautifully as well. Their chemistry is felt immediately, and it’s got a lovely, boyish lightness to it. But these are also very physical performances, especially from Clausen, who strikes an imposing posture as well as a soft one. He’s the one who most often has to play both a real person and the entity, while Bird has to play the guardedness of always questioning whether he’s talking to the real Ryan or not.

The script calls out the cruel point of this: it separates them, not just from someone they love, but from people who would support them and build an accepting community. Destroying a culture erases people as effectively as destroying the people themselves, and the people around Niam and Ryan’s are going for their throats.

Naim’s mom (Mia Wasikowska) sums up the town’s ethos best, telling her son, “We need fear. It’s how we survive.” And that’s after she tells him that she knew about the entity. She had knowingly given her son torment because it was her own twisted take on loving him. She thought it was best. And that’s the real-life horror Leviticus throws in your face. Not the supernatural monster but the deep-rooted bigotry that would drive even a mother to torment her son. All because of a few lines in a book.

Release: now in theaters
Director: Adrian Chiarella
Writer: Adrian Chiarella
Cast: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Jeremy Blewitt, Mia Wasikowska