Leviticus

LEVITICUS   **1/2

Adrian Chiarella

2026

IDEA:  After being subjected to a religious ritual to cleanse them of their homosexuality, two teenage boys find themselves hunted by an entity that takes the form of the other. 

BLURB:  A recent trend in LGBTQ indie filmmaking has used the horror genre to explore religious bigotry, physicalizing sexual oppression as a deadly supernatural force preying on gay youth in conservative communities (see Almamula and Ganymede, both 2023). While the monsters in those films were more generalized manifestations of homophobia the protagonists had to contend with largely alone, Leviticus adds an intriguing wrinkle to the formula: romance, as both a target for and bulwark against a provincial town’s homophobic Christian dogmas. Chiarella’s central metaphor is blunt but potent, conveying how society weaponizes fear to suppress queer identities, and how in turn queer people internalize that fear so they’re forced to see the things they desire as dangerous. As human nature evinces, though, repressing desire only makes it stronger, and it’s the palpable intensity of desire as communicated between Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen that makes Leviticus work better as romance than horror. There are some genuinely unnerving moments — a bloody invasion of home (and mouth) is a standout — but Chiarella’s script is too underbaked, and the cinematography too slick, for these elements to really take hold. Character development is minimal, as is the elaboration of the town itself, which has plenty of forbidding rural-industrial atmosphere but little in the way of social logic. Everything is in the service of allegory; thankfully, Leviticus is so short the allegory doesn’t have time to be beaten into the ground, nor, regrettably, does it have time to be fully fleshed out.