SXSW London 2026 – Leviticus ★★

Released: TBC (SXSW London)

Director: Adrian Chiarella

Starring: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen

Adrian Chiarella’s feature film debut, Leviticus, was the second of two queer horror films I saw at SXSW London that were metaphorically obvious, the other being Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The only difference is that Jane Schoenbrun uses it intentionally, working to their advantage; Adrian, on the other hand, does not.

Taking place in a suburban Australian environment, Leviticus follows two teenage boys Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), being stalked by a violent entity who appears in the form of the person they most desire, which just so happens to be each other. The film throws a lot at you immediately. It begins with a quick and cliched horror cold opening, as we see a woman making out with someone invisible in a swimming pool shower, only for it to end in bloodshed. After that, we are thrown into its core relationship that already exists, supplying little backing to either protagonist. The highly religious families of the boys attend a church where a so-called “deliverance healer” inflicts a form of possession on anyone suspected of being homosexual, where an invisible being comes to beat them up, pushing them closer to death or to what this film nods at: heterosexuality. The film’s biggest problem is this misguided metaphor of aligning the possessed state with conversion therapy, pitting its characters against one another in a desperate and blatant plea for provocation, as it spends the rest of its runtime limping over the line. 

It attempts to utilise a decrepit industrial space, filled with grey, concrete buildings and drab colours, in which the boys and their barely perceptible families inhabit. Chiarella, though, never manages to squeeze the juice out of his surroundings to make them have a lasting effect on the hopelessness of his characters. His filmmaking feels amateurish rather than intentionally dull, stuck in something that harkens to shallow focus, excessive backlighting, and shaky cam. Leviticus can be best described through the guise of other films, as its thin and far-between moments of terror exist in other films way before its own. At times, it plays like a pathetic rendition of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, both of whom follow characters given curses and subsequently hunted down by being invisible to everyone else but themselves. Chiarella’s film seemed doomed from the moment that a literal image of a snake eating a frog appeared in the opening moments, as this rotten and oblivious film tries to fool you into allegoric sensibilities but ends up falling flat on its own face, unable to supply an atmospheric backing that it so begs for. 

Contemporary horror is on a roll with general audiences at the moment; in fact, horror is about the only genre where indie filmmaking appears to be thriving at the box office, and its current trend of mean and nasty movies seems never-ending, leading viewers to believe that baseless violence will always be credible. Leviticus attempts to tap into this vague movement by using moments that want to be nasty for the sake of drawing viewer engagement, which, right now, seems to be the only basis for compliments in these pictures. This film, however, never even reaches that one-note status because it is too feeble to dive headfirst into any one idea. It wants to be mean, but apart from a couple of transparent scenes, it never even subscribes to that notion, fixing itself in an undecided limbo. Perhaps worst of all is its need for a sappy resolution; a film that spent its entire runtime trying to convince you of its industrial and suburban doom, pulls back its own blanket into a world of futile hope. 

Leviticus may follow homosexual relationships between its sparse set of stock characters, but it never manages to tap into the pipeline of what makes so many of today’s queer films function. It’s perpetually at a distance from contemporary happenings, incapable of harnessing its cultural zeitgeist effectively, only qualified to visualise generalised portraits of a broken world. Yes, there are religious sects out there that punish the idea, but its transgressions are tasteless, and its core duo never resembles anything tangible.