There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t require a monster at all — one rooted not in the supernatural but in the deeply familiar: the fear of being seen and known, of having the people who are supposed to protect you becoming your biggest threat. Great horror has always understood this. Leviticus understands it too, and is at its best when the film trusts that that’s enough. It’s at its worst when it reaches for the trappings of the genre to prove the point.
It’s easy to understand why Leviticus is a slice-of-life drama nestled in the pretext of being a horror film. The genre is having an extraordinary run over the last year: Sinners, Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession, and other films have made the case that smart, ambitious filmmaking and genuine scares aren’t mutually exclusive. That rising tide has a way of pulling films into its current, and Leviticus, which might otherwise have landed as a quiet, lo-fi arthouse romance, arrives wearing the genre’s clothing. Some of it fits. Some of it doesn’t.
Written and directed by Adrian Chiarella, Leviticus follows two teenage boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), navigating first love in a conservative religious community in backcountry Australia. After being caught and forced into conversion treatment by their parents, a violent entity pursues them, taking the form of whoever they desire most. It’s the kind of premise that does a lot of work on its own, and Chiarella is smart enough to let it. The film is at its most assured in the quieter register: the slow accumulation of feeling and the strange combination of pleasure and dread in its pursuit. The chemistry between the leads is real, and the performances — including strong supporting turns from Mia Wasikowska as Naim’s mom — earn the weight the film is asking them to carry.
The horror is another matter. The trouble isn’t that Leviticus reaches for metaphor. It’s that the metaphor swallows the genre whole. Not one person in this movie tries to combat the horror in a way that a real person would – not the protagonists, the parents, or the community at large. Everyone serves the allegory instead, resulting in head-scratching confusion instead of the kind of frustration that makes you yell “don’t go in there!” at the screen. The allegory is rich, but horror has its own grammar, and Leviticus opts out of it almost entirely in favor of thematic weight.
As a result, you could almost lift out the twenty or thirty percent of the film that plays as outright horror and find something cleaner underneath. A film operating closer to dramatic dread than fright. The threat is most effective when it’s implied, and that version of Leviticus is genuinely unsettling.
The It Follows comparison has followed Leviticus since Sundance, and it’s instructive. Mitchell’s film worked because its monster honored genre logic and carried metaphorical freight simultaneously: the two registers reinforced each other rather than competing. Leviticus tips the balance too far in one direction. It’s going for the same unease and doesn’t quite conjure the same scares. Whether that’s a failure depends on what you came for.
And that’s perhaps the most honest way to leave it. Leviticus is a good movie, but not a great one. That said, the romance at its center is worth the price of admission on its own terms, and Chiarella is a real voice. If the horror wrapper gets more people in seats, the tradeoff might have been worthwhile. Just know going in which half of that genre label is doing the heavy lifting.