Adrian Chiarella’s supernatural conversion therapy thriller is a radical scream for empathy that commands your terrified attention
The Australian outback of Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus is a Hell its characters are desperate to dress up as Heaven: a barren wasteland whose only yield is devout worship and churning industrialization, polluting soil, sky, and spirit alike in an endless drive to consume, control, and propagate. It’s a culture defined by the violent perpetuation of its own self-described natural order, one where anything aberrant must be bent back into alignment–even if that requires demonic force dressed up as loving faith.
Like the other kids in his small town, Naim (Joe Bird, Talk to Me) is a product of that mechanical love: a regular churchgoer with his distant mom Arlene (Mia Wasikowska), a uniform-wearing student, unremarkable by social design. What draws Naim out of his shell is a budding romance with jockish Ryan (Stacy Clausen), with secret makeout sessions arising from play-fighting in an abandoned factory at the edge of town.
When Naim discovers Ryan’s involvement with another boy, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), he retaliates by exposing them to Hunter’s father: the town preacher. The boys are subjected to a hollow “conversion” ritual led by a mysterious healer, after which they’re stalked by a violent, unseen force. Only when Naim is forced through the same ritual does it reveal itself: a demon that seduces and kills by assuming the form of its victims’ deepest desire. For Naim and Ryan, that means each other.
Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature is a testament to the elemental power of Queer horror, featuring a devilishly simple premise wielded with raw, deeply personal force. In bravura, effects-heavy sequences including an eerie photo booth makeout with an invisible partner and a Psycho-echoing shower kill, Chiarella swiftly establishes the rules of Leviticus’ demon, the better to foreground the physical and emotional trauma they inflict on those bound to them. Much of Leviticus’ true terror lies in Naim and Ryan’s inability to be intimate without risking death–their inability to distinguish each other from the demon hunting them a socially sanctioned supernatural wedge driving them apart. Shifting seamlessly between aching romance and visceral horror, Leviticus uses familiar tropes to capture the suffocating paranoia of risking everything for a love still shunned by the world you’re forced to grow up in.
Leviticus taps into cinema’s long, uneasy entanglement of Queerness and Horror–a genre that has both perpetuated the social othering of LGBTQ+ people and, at times, fostered radical empathy for their experiences. Alongside slasher tropes equating sex with death, those who defy cisheteronormativity have long been cast as monstrous or punished by violence. But Naim and Ryan’s quiet intimacy–a feral, tender first love blooming in stolen moments–is hardly horrific. That’s Chiarella’s cruelly succinct starting point: regardless of how desire is acted upon, their longing becomes the demon’s most effective weapon, a jagged mirror of the casual cruelty of a world with a long memory for such things.
That memory is inscribed into the film’s very landscape, as Chiarella and cinematographer Tyson Perkins’ visual language of landscape-scarring machinery not only reinforces their interrogation of “natural” order, but evokes darker chapters in Queer history. The film’s recurring pasture fences operate not only as physical manifestations of the social borders imposed on Naim and Ryan, but as charged symbols of exclusion and violence — recalling tragedies felt worldwide like the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, while sequences in dark, sparse forests or ambushed assaults evoke decades of homophobic murders in New South Wales. Whether it’s the legacy of Queer cinema or Queer history, Leviticus remains acutely aware of what horrors it’s borne from and what horrors it inherits. It fully drags the historical and cinematic subtext of its horror into harsh, timely reality, handling romance and real-life tragedy with delicate care while wielding its central metaphors with blunt, necessary rage.
This raw directness allows Leviticus to speak to Queer and straight audiences alike through deeply real fears. It’s terrifying enough to confess your feelings to someone–yet Leviticus builds upon the uniquely marginalized terror that whoever you trust with your vulnerability might respond to that openness with assault or annihilation. Like the demon itself, that fear is invisible to those with nothing to socially fear from their own desires, and all-consuming for those like Naim, Ryan, and Hunter who do. By casting any socially-bucking desire as inherently monstrous, where wanting alone is transgression enough to invite oblivion, Leviticus renders such soul-crushing pain devastatingly literal.
In doing so, Leviticus makes the It Follows comparison similarly stalking the film feel both apt and insufficient. It’s a crucial distinction that this curse is thrust upon its victims by others, not contracted through their own sexual choices. It’s a hijacking of both intimacy and identity, preying on the universal craving for connection while forcing it through the limiting lens of socially otherized physical acts–stripping victims of any agency to define either on their own terms.
That limitation is also Leviticus’ most pointed critique of those who reduce Queer identity and its representation to solely who we fuck and how. The demon lures its victims into aggressive physical encounters, fixating on carnal “proof” in the same way loved ones and faith leaders discard the fullness of their children at the faintest whiff of sin. Naim, Ryan, and Hunter attempt repression as a survival tactic–but their hauntings persist regardless, assimilation only delaying an inevitable breaking point that gives the demon the “evidence” it needs to justify its violence. That some critics have taken Leviticus to task for being too graphic or not graphic enough misses Chiarella’s point entirely: both the demon and the town that unleashes it believe any outward expression of transgressive desire, regardless of explicitness, deserves condemnation.
What pushes Leviticus into necessary Queer filmmaking is how its central characters refuse to be crushed by the film’s converging forces of supernatural terror and bigotry. Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and Jeremy Blewitt each couch their physicality in a familiar performative masculinity–their rituals of perceived straightness so seamlessly intertwined with their hidden gay identities that they test each other’s mettle by casting stones at each other or wrestling for dominance before transitioning, just as naturally, into feverish, intimate exploration. As the demon co-opts not just their identities but their actions, forcing a choice between celibacy, conformity, or death, it compels Naim and Ryan to confront the limits of both their emotional and physical connection. Their conclusions they come to are a devastatingly romantic rejection of that enforced paradigm, one cultivated by adults willing to invite malevolent forces either to cast out perceived sin or, more pitifully, to shield their children from a hatred they themselves perpetuate. It’s an embrace of what Naim and Ryan have found in each other, even knowing the violent cost.
Evolving past horror tropes that equate Queerness with death, Chiarella’s masterful film forcefully carves out room for a blindingly defiant joy. That despite the terror of longing, discovery, rejection, or bigotry, standing up for who and what you love remains just as powerful, natural, and lethal a weapon as any horror the world can cast upon you.
Leviticus had its Texas Premiere at SXSW 2026. The film arrives in theaters June 19, 2026 courtesy of Neon.
