It is not every week that a film leaves us sitting in silence for the entire car ride home. That is what Leviticus did.
This is an Australian queer horror film written and directed by Adrian Chiarella, arriving in theatres during Pride Month and making one hell of a statement about the horror that exists long before any supernatural entity shows up. We saw it on opening week, and we had a lot to say once we finally started talking.
The Film, the Setting, and Why Australian Horror Keeps Hitting
The simplest way to describe Leviticus is what Meaghan lands on after dismissing the official synopsis as barely scratching the surface: it is a queer coming-of-age horror film about two boys navigating growing feelings for each other inside a deeply homophobic, religion-dominated small town in Australia, and what happens when the community’s violence against them takes on a physical, supernatural form. That is the base layer. There is a lot more underneath.
The film premiered in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026 and was picked up by Neon shortly after earning rave reviews there. It was also nominated for an audience award at South by Southwest. For a smaller release, this one has been generating the kind of early heat that feels like it deserves a much bigger conversation, kind of like Obsession did.
And then there is the Australian horror factor, which Arthur immediately clocks: “Holy crap.” The conversation about what makes Australian horror distinct is one we have had before, and we keep coming back to it because films keep proving the point. Meaghan puts it as well as anyone could:
It doesn’t feel like it’s overly flashy or very Hollywood. It feels like it’s telling a real and raw story regardless of what the film is.
Leviticus is very much in that tradition. The production designer was chosen specifically for her subdued colour palette, and it shows. The town feels like a graveyard of industrial buildings held together by a church at the centre, which is, frankly, the whole point.
The title itself is doing a lot of work before a single frame plays. Leviticus, the Old Testament book, is known for some of the most explicitly anti-gay passages in the Bible: that two men lying together is an abomination, and that they shall be put to death. The film is named after that text deliberately, and it frames everything that follows.
Cast, Chemistry, and What Two Weeks of Rehearsals Can Do
Joe Bird plays the lead, Naim, and this is worth pausing on because Joe Bird in Talk to Me (playing Riley, the little brother) was already remarkable. Meaghan says she remembers watching Talk to Me, thinking he was the standout.
Arthur, watching Leviticus, kept having one specific thought:
This guy would be really good in a zombie movie. I don’t know why.
He has a point, even if he can’t fully articulate it. There is something about the way Bird carries sadness on his face that just works for genre cinema. Meaghan’s read: “He looks very sad a lot. It’s just the way his face is.“
Stacy Clausen plays Ryan, Naim’s classmate and the person Naim develops feelings for. Meaghan’s first description of him is “young Heath Ledger in the best way possible,” and she pushes anyone who has seen the film to confirm this in the comments because she does not think she can be the only one who saw it.
The chemistry between the two leads is not accidental. Chiarella put them through two weeks of rehearsals before a single day of principal photography, ran them through acting exercises together, and at one point dropped them into a shopping complex with instructions to stay in character and buy each other gifts as their characters would.
It partially backfired because some people recognised Joe Bird. He stayed in character the whole time anyway. Chiarella also drove them around the filming locations before production started, just to absorb the atmosphere together. The result, as Arthur puts it, is chemistry that:
Feels so real because they actually had a chance to explore it.
The supporting cast deserves a mention too, and not a flattering one. Mia Wasikowska plays Naim’s mother, Arlene, and Meaghan, who describes herself as someone who usually tries to find the parental perspective in horror films, no matter how extreme, is unequivocal: “No sympathy on my end.“
The character never shouts. She never gets physical. She just denies and enables and quietly becomes “the villain of the fucking film,” as Meaghan puts it. Nicholas Hope plays a deliverance healer, and Ewen Leslie plays the preacher. Neither is there to make you feel comfortable.
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The Entity and Why It Is the Smartest Metaphor We Have Seen This Year
Here is where the film does something genuinely brilliant. The supernatural element works like this: after the community’s deliverance ritual is performed on a queer person against their will, an entity begins to stalk them. It can only appear when they are alone. And it takes the exact physical form of the person they desire most.
The connection to It Follows is something Meaghan and Arthur both call out early, and it is apt. But where It Follows used its entity as a metaphor for the anxiety around teenage sex and STIs, Leviticus uses its entity to represent something different: the way homophobia in religious communities is built on the belief that sexuality can be prayed away, talked out of, exorcised.
The entity manifests as the person you love. And Arthur puts the key detail plainly: even if you leave town, it will still find you, and it will just look like whoever you fall for next, whether that is three years from now or ten.
That was, like, by far my favorite thing about this movie, it’s very smart. Fucking smart.
Meaghan takes it further: “How brilliant of a metaphor is that for the idea that many of these communities do this stuff and ostracise these people because they act as though queerness is a choice? They can just pray it away or talk themselves out of it, and suddenly it will no longer exist for them. It will follow you everywhere, and it will manifest itself as the next person that you have feelings for because it doesn’t just go away. That’s not a thing.“
The entity also evolves throughout the film, which adds another layer. At first, it is relatively easy to identify: it looks like the other person but immediately acts wrong. By the midpoint, Arthur says, there is a scene where he was completely convinced he was watching the actual character.
The entity had adapted, had picked up memories, and had started behaving like the real person. “Absolutely insane,” he says. A lot of the actors’ physical responses to the entity were unscripted, which Arthur credits as part of why the internal struggle reads as so authentic onscreen.
The Writing, the Town, and Everyone Being Terrible
Chiarella came to this project with a lot of research done on how homosexuality is treated, not just within Christianity but across multiple religious traditions. He is a gay man himself, and that comes through in the writing in ways that are hard to fake. As Meaghan says:
If he didn’t grow up in a religious community, then he’s excellent at researching it.
The film operates less like an outsider studying a phenomenon and more like someone who has thought about this for a long time and finally found the right frame for it.
The town itself is a character. It is tiny, industrial, not updated, not nice. The church fits maybe twenty people. The colour palette is deliberately drab. Meaghan describes the church community as not feeling mainstream even within the already-religious town: “It doesn’t feel like it did not feel mainstream at all. It felt very like, the real extreme people go to this one.” She compares it to the distinction between the mainstream LDS church and the fundamentalist LDS offshoot. You know the vibe.
What makes the writing work is that nearly everyone outside the two leads is terrible, but none of them is a cartoon. The mother never hits anyone. The father of one of the other boys, Hunter, just leaves after his son dies.
The sister initially seems like she might be a refuge and then turns quickly. Arthur’s read is that “everyone is terrible in this movie except the two characters.” Meaghan gives the sister a small amount of grace: she is a teenager, her brother just died, her father just abandoned her. But yes, she still does terrible things, and she is still irredeemable by the end.
The Score, the Runtime, and Where We Are Sitting
Meaghan’s final favourite is something that does not always get enough attention: the physical performances. Stacy Clausen, in particular, when he is playing the entity that looks like Ryan, and during the exorcism sequences, where he jerks across the floor.
These things kind of deserve a lot of credit because it’s difficult to do this stuff.
She says. She compares it to the zombie performances in Train to Busan, which is a real compliment.
The score works. The runtime is tight (Arthur initially thought it was moving fast at the top, but landed on: “You don’t need to expand on a bunch of stuff. We get it.“). The visuals are exactly what they need to be and nothing more.
Both Meaghan and Arthur came out of the theatre feeling raw. Meaghan is at an 8.5. Arthur is at a minimum of 8 and calls it a strong contender for his top 10 of the year. For a feature debut, this is a remarkable film. For a Pride Month release, it is perfectly, purposefully timed. This one should not fall under the radar.