'Leviticus' Horror Frames Its Demon as Queer Teen Shame
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- "Leviticus" follows Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), two teenage boys in rural Australia raised in a restrictive church, who are brought before a "deliverance healer" who curses each to be stalked by a spectral version of the other — a conceit the reviewer reads as "conversion therapy via aversion therapy."
- Mia Wasikowska plays Naim's mother in a role the reviewer flags as one of the film's sharpest ideas: a woman who genuinely loves her son but forces the unorthodox, potentially lethal exorcism on him, embedding a lifetime lesson that "no place is safe."
- Neon acquired "Leviticus" after its Sundance debut earlier this year, and the review positions it alongside same-day release "Obsession" and "Backrooms" as part of a summer slate of horror breakouts by first-time directors using genre to explore relationship dynamics.
- The demonic figure functions as embodied internalized shame rather than a conventional monster, with the review noting that the demon appears to want to caress the boys before choking them — contact and violence already confounded by their "cascading spirals of self-doubt."
- In the ending, Naim uses the exorcist's tool of fire to trap the demon in the abandoned mill where the boys first met; the film closes with the two on a bus sharing a pair of headphones, a "stolen moment" the reviewer frames as "the optimistic ending of what may be summer's most surprising love story."
Why it matters: For Neon, positioning "Leviticus" as a love story rather than a pure scare-fest — as this review does explicitly — could broaden the audience beyond horror fans in a crowded summer slate. The same-day contrast with "Obsession" shows first-time directors using genre for unusually specific relationship diagnosis, here converting internalized homophobia into an embodied, bloodthirsty threat that only the boys' bond can dispel.
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