Leviticus Makes Horror's Most Uncomfortable Bet Yet

Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus drops in six days, and the premise alone is doing something most horror films won't even attempt. Two teenage boys trapped in conversion therapy must survive a violent entity that shapeshifts into the person they desire most. Each other. Read that again. The monster wears the face of your deepest shame and your deepest want simultaneously. That isn't a gimmick. That's a gunshot in a quiet room.

THE DOCTRINE OF DESIRE

Horror has always known that repression breeds monsters. The Shining locked a dry drunk in a snowbound hotel and let the building drink him. Don't Look Now turned a grieving couple's denial into a labyrinth of dread. Leviticus applies that same architecture to queer shame, and it does it inside an institution designed to exterminate identity. Conversion therapy isn't just a backdrop here. It's the theology of the monster. The entity doesn't just attack Naim and Ryan. It weaponizes the exact thing the therapy tells them to kill. You want him? Here he is. He's coming for you. The tagline writes the check: "It will never stop."

CHIARELLA'S CONFESSIONAL

Adrian Chiarella wrote and directed this, and his track record suggests he's been circling this exact wound for a while. He served as script editor on Lonesome, a 2023 film about a man isolated and wrestling with identity in a hostile environment. His earlier work, Dwarf Planet and Black Lips, operated in spaces of alienation and confinement. Leviticus isn't a pivot. It's the inevitable escalation. Chiarella has been tightening the screws on isolation and self-destruction for a decade. Now he's built a whole theology around it. At 88 minutes, the film doesn't have room to sprawl. That's an advantage. The best supernatural horror operates like a vise. You clamp down and let the pressure do the work.

THE CONGREGATION

Joe Bird plays Naim. If you saw Talk to Me, you remember the ballistic chaos he brought to that possession mechanics. Here, he's not channeling external forces. He's fighting an internal one that refuses to stay internal. Stacy Clausen plays Ryan, a performer who's already proving his range this year with Thrash after the sailing drama True Spirit. These two have to sell a dynamic where the person standing in front of you might be the boy you're terrified to want, or the thing wearing his skin. That's a brutal acting problem. Bird and Clausen live in the space between yearning and terror, and if Chiarella's direction holds, that ambiguity is where the horror metastasizes. Mia Wasikowska plays Arlene, bringing serious weight from Crimson Peak and the Alice films. Nicholas Hope, credited as Deliverance Healer, has a filmography that runs from The Invisible Man to Scooby-Doo to Anacondas. That range is a survival skill for Australian genre cinema. He knows exactly how to calibrate menace for the material.

THE AUSTRALIAN HORROR MACHINE

Look at those production credits. Causeway Films. Screen Australia. VicScreen. Arenamedia. This is the infrastructure that built Talk to Me, The Babadook, and Relic. Australian horror doesn't do safe. It finds a domestic nightmare, strips the comfort out of it, and leaves you alone with whatever crawls out of the walls. Causeway Films specifically has a track record of identifying young directors with something sharp to say and giving them the tools to say it ugly. Jed Kurzel on composer duties is another tell. His scores don't comfort you. They sit on your chest. Samantha Jennings and Kristina Ceyton producing means the film has producers who know how to birth conceptual horror without smoothing down the edges. Tyson Perkins behind the camera is the final structural bet on new vision.

THE SERMON

Leviticus could fumble the landing. Supernatural horror that tackles real trauma faces a constant risk: the metaphor overtakes the mechanics, and the entity becomes a symbol instead of a threat. The best version of this film makes the entity terrifying on its own terms while the thematic undercurrent does its damage underneath. The worst version becomes a lecture with jump scares. Chiarella's short runtime is promising. He has 88 minutes to break these boys down and build something back up, or leave them shattered. Either works. The middle ground is where horror goes to die. The film opens June 18. Bring your defenses. You won't need them.