It felt like an impossibility that I would not see (and write about) the new film Leviticus by director Adrian Chiarella. A horny horror film about gay boys being tormented by an incomprehensible demon? Where can I sign up?
We’re only slightly into the second week of its U.S. release, and the film has done moderately well so far, according to Box Office Mojo (especially against a minuscule $3.5 million budget). Whether buzz or word-of-mouth takes it to Obsession or Sinners levels of success remains to be seen, but it has potential. It is still somewhat startling to see a trailer with so much unbound gay making-out, even in the year of our Lord 2026. Indeed, it struck me as somewhat icky seeing all this fooling around on screen (there’s a lot) because the two leads truly look like children. They are, of course, meant to be sexually repressed high school students, but still, most TV and film about teens will cast people who are like 28 years old to play kids barely out of their quinceañera. (Hello, Freaks and Geeks!)
The film concerns two young men, Naim and Ryan, who strike up a steamy relationship in the swamp of eternal teenage boredom. Naim (Joe Bird) has just moved to a desolate cowtown in Victoria with his mom, played by the great and underutilized Mia Wasikowska. Seemingly a petrochemical outpost — there are constant shots of burning smokestacks, though the local industry is never directly addressed — the place makes Beckley, West Virginia look like the goddamn French Riviera. (It reminded me of nothing so much as Sean Baker’s 2021 Red Rocket, about another benighted nowhere haunted by chemical industry.) Naim is a waifish lad, and he soon takes up with the more conventionally handsome Ryan (Stacy Clausen). Their Jackie/Marilyn, dark/light dichotomy works perfectly.
Naim’s mom, a taciturn and distant woman with constantly pursed lips and furrowed brow, is unfortunately a member of a cult-like evangelical sect. We see the suffocating services of the congregation seated in folding chairs (no pews) while an insane pastor rants and raves. Once the boys are found out, they’re subjected to a bizarre exorcism ritual. Their sinful desires have to be expunged.
What follows is the gay It Follows (one of the best horror films of recent vintage). While that movie played with the classic trope of sex-is-death by having teens chased by a disembodied phantasmagoria (basically, AIDS) until they can pass it on to someone else by fucking, in this film the boys are pursued by an entity that represents itself as their beloved and tries to kill them constantly. In other words, most of the movie is one of the lovers being attacked by a simulacrum of the other. It is a smart and unnerving premise, because their own shame and stigma are manifested as the thing they desire.
The film is consistently entertaining and, like great horror, often funny. The entire cast is excellent, and the story builds to a seemingly impossible conclusion. A viewer wonders, how can they get out of this situation? How can this end? I’m happy to say the resolution is satisfying and apropos, unlike almost all sex we had in high school.
A few things stood out to me, though: what was up with all the jewelry? The boys’ golden necklaces are very frequently and deliberately highlighted, and they wear more rings than any 16-year-old boy I’ve ever seen. It has to mean something, and I don’t think it’s just “they’re gay.” Power lines and towers are also a notable motif. Why was Naim’s mom so aloof and uninterested in her son’s life, apart from trying to strangle his sexuality in the name of whatever psychotic religion she belonged to?
Leviticus is ultimately a metaphor for so-called sexual conversion therapy. The adults in the room want to pray the gay away or otherwise beat it out of the young men, which is always a hopeless and cruel adventure. Sexuality becomes a vampiric trauma that cannot possibly “fix” a person, but affixes itself on to them. Like the monster in It Follows, you can’t get away from it; even if you moved from Bumfuck Victoria to Nome, Alaska, it will still come for you. You have to take it head on and stare it down. Those of us who have been marginalized or shamed for our identities will understand exactly what’s going on in this movie, and Leviticus materializes that heartbreak in a dark fairy tale about reckoning with pain.
It also features a shocking amount of boys throwing various objects at each other for no reason. I really don’t know what’s going on over there in the island continent.