Writer/director Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus has important things to say, and there are two performances at its center I hope lead to more of a career for both Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen. Visually, there’s a lot to appreciate. The industrial, suburban wasteland of Australia, smoke stacks, abandoned mills. There’s beauty in all of this. But ultimately, this is an ineffective film, and one that’s glaringly reductive of It Follows in plot, execution, style, and even theme.
I doubt the debt is on purpose, but I’d be very surprised if it isn’t at least subconsciously infused, because the allusions are so direct. The industrial wasteland evoking the suburban gothic beauty of It Follows. Entities showing up out of nowhere. The slow burn pacing. The sexual manifestation of someone walking at you, summoned by your personal choices. It’s all in there.
The other issue is that the film is cripplingly earnest, which detracts from the powerful message at its core. Leviticus is shocking and honest about homophobia and repression, but a bit saccharine when it needs to be braver. It’s also surprisingly, and I don’t like this word, neutered. For a film about sex and repression and the queer male experience, living in the dangers of horror and outsider art, I don’t understand why there wasn’t more of a sexual charge. There’s a real ache between the two leads, but the delivery of queer love stays close to chaste. The one sexual scene is so softened and cute. I’m not saying a film has to have sex in it, but when a film is about the repression of queer male passion, it would have been braver to show what they’re fighting for, what’s being taken from them. Show us: you can’t repress this. This is who we are. It’s impossible to.
The romance is strong, and honestly the film works best as a romance. The tragic dynamic of two lovers held apart works on a dramatic level. But the subtext beneath it never quite becomes text, and the mechanics, a messier, less effective, and way less scary iteration of It Follows’ rules, are haphazard and a little confusing. There’s a better film in here somewhere. It would have rewritten itself a couple more times and really worked out the mechanics, separated what works individually for this movie from what worked in other films. The rules would have been clarified, simplified, ironed out.
The performances elevate the page significantly. On paper, the character interactions are a little silly and younger in execution than the characters seem to be. The classic “we’re gonna fight, and then we’re gonna kiss” beat came across as juvenile in a movie otherwise turning toward naturalism. But Bird and Clausen‘s heart is really present. Bird gives something of a star making performance. His portrayal of a young queer man is effective, honest, believable. He’s magnetic to watch even though, on the page, his protagonist is a terrible one, strung from set piece to set piece by invisible force with very little agency.
And then there are the scares. They’re sparse, and sometimes ineffective, but a few are exceptional. One involves a character outside a gas station at night, engaging with an invisible force that literally pulls him screaming, begging for help, into the darkness, while another character watches on in horror from inside. It’s simple, nonviolent, almost gothic, and it’s just good horror. The moment I started thinking about how the film wasn’t scaring me, Leviticus delivered a perfectly executed jump scare. Jump scares have a bad rap, but they’re an art form, and this one was earned.
Leviticus is, finally, a film for queer audiences, and horror is often so queer already, so often about the outsider. But when a queer drama uses horror as a packaging device, it’s a wasted opportunity for both elements. I want to stress that this film is saying important things. Queer people are facing erasure, and it’s getting worse. Leviticus is about the horrors of that erasure and the dangerous outcomes when you try to erase us, because, just like when you try to pave over moraine to build the suburbs, we’ll just reappear somewhere else and destroy your basements. I just wish this film had more interest in its own horror.
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