Poignant lead performances anchor tense Aussie horror

Bleak, beautiful and sad, this small Australian film combines art-house horror with a queer coming-of-age story. This is a monster movie in which the monster is homophobic hatred.

Naim and Ryan (Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen) are two teenage boys first seen doing teenage-boy stuff — breaking into an abandoned factory and goofing around.

We sense almost at once that all their wrestling and grappling is displaced desire. Ryan is a popular kid and Naim is a wary outsider, but a relationship grows between the two — tentative at first, then tender and passionate.

These adolescent feelings are complicated by the fact their families belong to a fundamentalist religious sect that dominates their tough small town.

A man identified only as “the deliverance healer” (Nicholas Hope) is called in to perform a kind of exorcism ritual, and in its supernatural aftermath, Naim and Ryan are stalked by a mysterious, malevolent force that takes the form of the thing they most crave — each other.

In this assured, economical and very understated feature debut, writer- director Adrian Chiarella relies on evocative visual images and an eerie soundscape. He finds minimalist, monochromatic poetry in industrial waste grounds, empty nighttime streets and flat fields of humming hydro lines.

Brief bursts of dialogue sketch in characters and their motivations. We meet Naim’s struggling single mother (Mia Wasikowska) and the church’s pastor (Ewen Leslie), whose Christian-rock, down-with-the-kids services mask something more controlling. We get a sense of the corrosive conformity that surrounds Naim and Ryan — the demonic entity that threatens them can be seen as a metaphor for conversion therapy — but very little is explicitly spelled out.

Leviticus relies on the basic mechanics of the horror genre, including some brief scenes of violence and gore and a couple of jump scares. But its unrelenting effect comes from an atmosphere of dread and psychological tension: Naim must fight for his life never knowing whether the Ryan he sees is his truest friend or a murderously destructive doppelganger.

“It’s what they wanted,” Naim says forlornly at one point. “For us to be scared of each other.”

Chiarella’s work is part of a wave of recent Australian frighteners such as The Babadook and Talk to Me (which also featured Bird). There will be comparisons to such films as It Follows and Obsession, where intimacy becomes dangerous, and to the pointed political commentaries of Jordan Peele’s horror trilogy (Get Out, Us and Nope). And there are nods to classic queer horror.

Ultimately, though, the film is its own thing. While functioning just fine as a horror flick, it works best as a delicate, closely observed love story, thanks to the young leads. Clausen’s work is fascinating to watch, with the initially self-assured Ryan changing before our eyes, but it’s Bird, who’s in almost every scene, who bears the film’s emotional weight on Naim’s heartbreakingly vulnerable shoulders.

Horror movies that end as well as they begin are rare, with things often falling apart once the monster gets out of the box. Leviticus is an exception, with Bird and Clausen’s poignant performances and palpable onscreen connection convincingly carrying the film to an intelligent, ambivalent conclusion.

winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor