Review: LEVITICUS

Naim and Ryan lark about with rough play until they break through the show and admit their mutual attraction. This is not the stuff of their small town that is gripped by the kind of psycho religion that appears warm and friendly until it doesn't. One day Naim goes over to Ryan's place and finds him involved in the same kind of rough and tumble with another boy. Without too much detail, following a ghastly ritual by a creepy travelling religious figure, Naim witnesses an act of violence against Ryan that appears to be committed by an invisible force. This makes sense of the weird prologue and will surface as an explanation in the middle act. Things are turning grim.

Part queer coming of age story and part supernatural horror tale, Adrian Chiarella's feature debut exhibits a clever idea of religious "conversion therapy". Rather than praying the gay away, the idea is to have the object of love become monstrously violent. This can involve doppelgangers who bring their own persuasion to the table.

It's too cold for satire but too loose for outright horror but its spell holds and works all the way through the running time. The one moment of deadpa humour towards the end feels like it's from another movie and is memorable for that reason alone. Mostly it's a slow pendulum swinging between the credible warmth between the lovers and the unforgiving punsihment the rest of the town wishes upon them. Mostly, though, it feels personal the same way that the Book of Revelation feels personal. That is an ultraviolent revenge fantasy but Leviticus is Moses' report of his god's dictation of law and conduct to avoid damnation. Remembering this adds great weight to this film's title. 

Chiarella makes great use of the locale, building on breathless nocturnal night streets, mills that smoke and spew flame and a muted pallet for a place that even nearby nature's beauty shudders to colour. This is strong world building, the way it always is when a setting that might seem to write itself is reconstructed  for atmoshere. Part of this is Jed Kerzel's electronic score with its groaning and wailing, hissing and growling as though the land and wind themselves are straining from the culture they surround.

There have been comparisions with It Follows but they are too shallow, missing the point of the entity and its way of being. It Follows played on a kind of penalty for wisdom, expressed like a sexually transmitted disease. This is something more hideous for its origins, the product of jealously guarded ignorance.

The leads, Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen offer the warm centre of the film, both very natural with each other. But they must also express the horror of its conceit, and it feels painful to witness the turn of the familiar faces from love to hard antagonism. A grown up Mia Wasikowska as Naim's mum provides a maternal support that degrades into its own creepiness.

If I felt a certain lacking while watching Leviticus, I think it's probably from the film's refusal to fall into the cliche that besets horror stories with teens. There is a information scene but even that is kept fragmentary. Recent horrors like It Follows and the Philipou's magnificent Talk to Me have dispensed with such scenes of authority and it furthers the sense of hopelessness necessary for stories like this to work: the traditional authority figures are absent, untrustworthy or even atagonistic. Leviticus uses this to blend a sense of despair that the final image sets in ancient stone.

Viewing notes: I went to a 10 am screening at the Kino in Melbourne. Sparsely attended and mostly by men about my age (who still seem to be a lot older to me) and a few much younger huddles. If there was talking or any cruddy behavious I didn't notice it. Mind you, this intense film could probably silence a Saturday night crowd.