Two teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most – each other.

This has been a good year for horror cinema and ‘Leviticus’ is another excellent entry to join the likes of ‘Obsession’ and ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ at the top of the list. It is a supernatural horror from Australia, which has produced some of the best recent horror films (‘Talk to Me’, ‘Bring Her Back’), starring Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen as two teenage boys who fall for each other while living in a rural religious town in the southeastern state of Victoria. Like the best horror films, it uses the genre to explore different themes, in this case homophobia and conversion therapy, rather than just attempting to scare, though it manages to do that as well!

Nairn (Joe Bird) has recently moved with his mother (Mia Wasikowska) to a new town following his father’s death, where he meets Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a local boy who is secretly gay. The two begin a secret romance, though when Nairn sees Ryan with another teenager, he outs them with disastrous consequences. Those consequences are set in motion by an extreme form of conversion therapy conducted by a scene-stealing Nicholas Hope as a ‘deliverance healer’, which ‘splits’ the individual in two and unleashes a violent, invisible force that shapeshifts into the person that you most desire. In the case of Nairn and Ryan, who both undergo the ‘therapy’, that triggers them to see each other without knowing if they’re speaking to the ‘real’ person, and ‘Leviticus’ gets great mileage out of this intriguing premise.

The nature of the threat is similar to that of ‘It Follows’ (another excellent, relatively recent horror film), and director Adrian Chiarella does an excellent job of balancing the scares with the thematic elements of the story in his debut feature. I thought both Bird and Clausen were terrific in the central roles, particularly as they have to sell the relationship between Nairn and Ryan while also creating a constant uncertainty over whether the person in front of them is actually who they appear to be. There are some genuinely unsettling sequences built around that uncertainty, while the fact that the threat takes the form of the person they most desire ties the horror neatly into what the film has to say about repression and attempts to change someone’s sexuality.

‘Leviticus’ works for me because the supernatural horror and the story it is trying to tell are so closely connected. The central idea is clever and genuinely frightening, but there’s also a strong emotional core in Nairn and Ryan’s relationship that gives the scares considerably more weight. It’s an impressive debut from Chiarella and another example of the excellent horror cinema that continues to come out of Australia.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Adrian Chiarella

Starring: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Jeremy Blewitt, Mia Wasikowska, Ewen Leslie, Davida McKenzie and Nicholas Hope

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt39143902/