LEVITICUS
***
Directed by Adrian Chiarella.
Starring Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska.
Horror, Australia, 88 Minutes, Certificate 15.
Released in Cinemas in the UK on September 2nd by Neon.
Pour one out for lead actor Joe Bird. Two films into his burgeoning career, and he is already looking and feeling like one of the most punished actors in the Australian genre filmscape. If what he went through in TALK TO ME wasn’t bad enough, here he is again getting pummeled and victimised for our sadistic entertainment once more in Adrian Chiarella’s effective queer horror, which marks his own feature length debut as writer and director. It also provides further proof of the resurgent mini-boom of genre filmmaking that Australia is currently experiencing.
Bird plays the meek and timid Naim, who after moving to a small industrial town is quickly wrapped up in a secret romance with his classmate Ryan (Clausen), a much more macho figure. Forced to hide their love not only from their schoolmates, they also have to keep up the illusion of distance from their parents, including Naim’s unsuspecting single mother Arlene (Wasikowska) and the devout Christina church they belong to. After a gut-wrenching series of events, Ryan is forced into an even more extreme version of queer conversion than usual at the hands of a orthodox healer/exorcist who claims to purge Ryan of his desires and sins. When attempting to reconcile with his boyfriend, Naim realises that the ceremony has unleashed a type of supernatural curse that will punish Ryan, and in turn Naim himself, to an astonishingly sadistic degree.
It has been long established in horror cinema that sex equals death, a trope that at one time, particularly during the slasher obsessed 1980’s, seemed to border on the puritanical. LEVITICUS seems to embrace the trope but in a way that skewers religion, homophobia and repression. The premise, and its stylish execution, are more than a little reminiscent of IT FOLLOWS, with its own spectral enemy conjured by desire. The claustrophobic and increasingly paranoid nature of Naim’s terror is expertly conjured here with the stifling, run down environment of the small Australian town which sits underneath a latticework of humming electricity and telephone wires, while smoke spews into the skies from a number of industrial chimneys. This, coupled with the cloying, threatening and repressive nature of the church and homophobic classmates give the film an atmosphere that is sinister enough before the violent spectre shows up to torment Naim and Ryan.
The film works exceedingly well; recognisable and identifiable for anyone who felt on the outside and excluded in their teenage years, no matter what their identity is. However it feels that it slightly pulls its punches a couple of times. The most gut clenching scenes, including one cleverly revealed betrayal, are rooted very much in reality while Wasikowska, making a welcome return to the screen after what seems like years, chillingly reveals herself in a way that is casually callous and all the more sickening with how off hand it comes out. The supernatural component of the film, while undeniably smart in concept and execution, slightly unravels in comparison as it goes along, especially when all sense of ambiguity is abandoned at one point.
Horror fans of all stripes should find something to admire in this smart teen horror that trades in biblical persecution in its own, mostly, effective manner. Fans of Australian cult cinema should also find themselves pleased with the more than welcome, if brief, re-appearance of Nicholas Hope, infamous for his titular role in the 1993 cult favourite BAD BOY BUBBY, as the unnerving exorcist. Whilst this is nowhere near as uncompromising as that once infamous film, this is quietly brave in its own way and also a more than promising signifier of where Australian horror cinema is heading now.
Iain MacLeod