Writer/director Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut Leviticus opens with credits on an otherwise blank screen, but also with the sounds of a busy indoor public pool at closing time, although it will be a minute or so before we actually see what we clearly hear. This will prove an apt prologue to a film that concerns unseen drives and closeted desires, and that introduces a relentless, murderous monster that is invisible to all but its specific prey.
Indeed, in this prologue, we cannot see the monster either. For while lifeguard Marnie (Tyallah Bullock) joins someone whom she evidently recognises in the shower area, this lover-cum-killer is kept out of shot. All we can see is that big empty swimming pool in the foreground (as Marnie is brutally slain in the background), subtly clueing us in to something akin to David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, whose adolescent horror unfolds around pools and oceans.
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Naim Reid (Joe Bird) is a nervous teenager. He is scared of heights, terrified of the snakes and spiders in the country town to which he has moved with his widowed mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska), introverted around classmates (he has made no friends in three years) – but mostly he is anxious about his homosexuality. Local gangs of his fellow teens have been know to bash, even kill, their gay peers, and the church central to the community calls in the mysterious Deliverance Healer (Nicholas Hope) to purge anyone who transgresses the injunctions against homosexuality found in the Book of Leviticus. His flame-based ritual is similar in its intent to conversion therapy, but in its design proves life-destroying, or even lethal, for those to whom it is administered.
Even as Naim starts for the first time exploring his feelings with the more experienced, altogether braver local Ryan Whelan (Stacy Clausen), both are pursued by a violent spectre that appears to both of them as the person they most love – which in their cases is each other. This is a potent visual metaphor for the clash between these boys’ sexual impulses and internalised homophobia, as they beat themselves up – and off – over their conflicted emotions, and struggle to find a place for themselves in a hostile, predatory environment. Here, as in Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism, directed by Chiarella’s fellow Australian Nick Kozakis, an intolerant church and its hypocritical preachers are the real threat, and the needy and vulnerable their victims.
As these two young men race to defeat or escape an entity that insidiously exploits the very appetites and inclinations that make them who they are, Leviticus is a horror film. Yet it is also a romance, where first kisses are exchanged, various obstacles hinder the course of true love and a shared adversity leads to togetherness against all odds. Here, love literally hurts, tearing lovers apart – but it also conquers all – while the real horror is the queer experience in a heteronormative world of bullying bigotry, hard hatred and the casting of pernicious stones. And what begins with water shall end with fire.