Two young lovers are targeted by a supernatural entity that takes their form of their respective objects of desire.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adrian Chiarella
Starring: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska, Jeremy Blewitt, Ewen Leslie, Davida McKenzie, Nicholas Hope, Zamira Newman
One of the most devastating moments in horror cinema comes near the end of Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams play two platonic friends who are clearly madly in love with each other, and the chemistry between the two performers is off the charts. We're rooting for them to get together through the whole film, so it is an emotional gut punch when Sutherland is forced to leave Adams alone for a brief moment, only to find that she has been replaced by a "body snatcher" upon his return.
I thought about Kaufman's film a lot while watching Australian horror movie Leviticus. Writer/director Adrian Chiarella has taken the central hook of the Body Snatchers concept - the fear of losing the person we love to something that looks just like them but is devoid of a soul - and has given it a queer spin. Here it's two teenage boys who fall madly in love, only to find some supernatural force is out to thwart them. As with Kaufman's film, if they stay together they're fine; it's when they're apart that they're vulnerable. And just as in any Body Snatchers movie, there are humans who are all too willing to collude with the evil antagonists.
Following the death of his father, Naim (Joe Bird) moves with his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) to a small post-industrial town where Arlene joins a local evangelical church that seems to combine the worst elements of Catholicism (guilt and shame), Protestantism (singalongs) and Voodoo (physical torment). Naim makes friends with Ryan (Stacy Clausen), but the two become something more when a bout of boyish horseplay turns into a full-on snogging session. Naim is taken aback while Ryan is more confident, but they both agree to keep their relationship a secret.
Naim's heart is broken when he later sees Ryan chewing faces with the pastor's son Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt). In a fit of rage, Naim tells the pastor (Ewen Leslie) what he saw. The pastor calls in the services of a "deliverance healer" (Nicholas Hope), who performs a creepy ritual to slay the gay away from Ryan and Hunter. But rather than killing the lads' obsession with Judy Garland and interior design, it brings forth a demon that terrorises them by taking the form of the person they love the most. When Arlene discovers her son is a friend of Dorothy she forces him to undergo the same treatment, and he too is marked by a demon taking the form of Ryan.
While aimed at a Gen-Z audience with its youthful protagonists, Leviticus will likely strike the loudest chord with gay men who are old enough to have survived an era when being with the one you love could literally kill you. Like Julia Ducournau's Alpha, Chiarella's film plays like a movie that really should have been released during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Yet while its narrative may have played more explicitly into existential dread a few decades ago, its theme still resonates. The modern world isn't as accepting as we'd like to think, especially in close-knit communities where superstition lingers. The movie suggests that for queer people, being apart is ultimately worse than being together, despite the social turmoil the latter might bring.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Leviticus is the idea that Naim will have to cut off ties with his mother if he wants to live his true life. The movie doesn't portray Arlene as a frothing, angry Bible-thumper in the manner of Carrie White's mother. She loves her son and believes she is doing what's best for him. Naim and Ryan will probably fall out at some point down the road, but a mother's love endures. Arlene is herself a secondary victim of this horrific scenario, as so many parents who can't accept their children's sexuality are.
Chiarella fashions a couple of nerve-wracking sequences from his premise, and as it's an Australian movie we know all bets are off when it comes to who might make it out alive. It is a little frustrating how we never learn the motivation of the evil force at play here. Does it only target homosexuals, and if so, why? Homophobia is very much a human construct, so the suggestion that the supernatural world would share such a prejudice is a weighty notion that deserves a little more interrogation than simply being reduced to a gay-bashing demon. But it is the performances of Bird and Clausen that make the concept work. Their believability as two young men wrestling with the question of whether the life they want for themselves is worth the suffering they will have to endure ensures the premise never feels hokey.
Leviticus is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 2nd.
