Flasz On Film

How much time is enough to gamble with repackaging an acclaimed horror movie into a different garb and releasing it for general audiences to see, hoping that they would either fail to connect the dots or that it wouldn’t matter to them in the long run? When does a rip-off become a piece of homage?

The reason I’m asking these questions is because Leviticus, directed and written by Adrian Chiarella in his feature debut, can be summarized using only five words and very little information would be lost in the process. Gay version of It Follows. That’s all you need to tell anyone who asks you about Leviticus and if they should go and see it. If they respond with, “Oh, I don’t know what It Follows is,” then I can only advise you to keep your cool, refrain from any negatively charged comments of the “what kind of a horror fan are you anyway” variety, and just tell them, calmly and confidently, to go and watch It Follows before heading out to see Leviticus. In fact, I’d go a step further and tell them to just stop at It Follows, which is a vastly superior film to Leviticus: full of kinetic dread, inventive scares, timeless characterizations and the kind of energy many modern horror movies wish they had a minute serving of.

Alas, if you have already decided that you’d want to commit eighty-something minutes of your waking life on this mortal coil to watching Leviticus, I’ll try to give you at least one reason to cling onto before I proceed to tear it to pieces. So, here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about this movie that I just told you to skip in favour of watching David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.

Despite the fact that the recent decade has seen a noticeable uptick of quality genre releases hailing from Down Under, the canonical idea of what an Australian-set horror movie looks like to modern audiences almost always includes the outback, unkempt wilderness, weird and potentially dangerous people and associated themes of survival. Think Wolf Creek, Rogue, The Royal Hotel, The Nightingale, etc. Anything set in modern-day Australia may be difficult to localize visually because those settings look “generally Western” enough to fade into the crowd of other genre movies. While movies like The Babadook, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, or Dangerous Animals and others might be recognized as Australia-set to anyone with a keen enough eye for detail, their suburban settings might simply register as slightly generic and the only way to single them out as Aussie-based is by making note of the way people speak.

Leviticus, on the other hand, does something interesting as it does not set its story in the ravenous outback full of snakes and hillbilly serial killers or the affluent American-looking suburbia. Instead, the movie opts for the kind of small-town setting that rarely gets to be featured on camera: those industrialized backwaters perched right at the frontier of civilization, sequestered from bustling metropolises where the unsightly vistas of factory chimneys belching smoke and steam into the atmosphere would be most unwelcome. In this Australian rust belt, Chiarella sketches out a small-town community orbiting what looks like an industrial hub; a little place in the middle of nowhere that in the eyes of its young inhabitants is not a place to call home, but rather a place to leave at the earliest opportunity. In it he finds two teenage boys, Naim and Ryan (Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen), who find each other in this drowsy, slumberous environment and develop romantic desire subconsciously knowing that their conservative hometown wouldn’t accept it. Eventually, and with a solid helping of jealousy on Naim’s behalf spurred by witnessing some mysterious and bizarre events, their secret love is found and their parents hire a priestly-looking shaman to perform a ritual on them in an effort to cast out their homo-erotic lust.

Consequently, Naim begins to have supernatural experiences: he sees other gay teens attacked by invisible malevolent forces and finds himself stalked by something that looks like Ryan that only he can see. Thus, It Follows begins to unfold in the Australian industrialized frontier; but with a wrinkle. While David Robert Mitchell’s film more generally anthropomorphized an anxiety relating to sexual initiation frequently weaponized into fear by conservative parents who would brainwash their adolescent children into believing that having premarital sex will spell their doom, Chiarella’s take on the same concept relies on something subtly different. Leviticus gives shape to a fear that’s adjacent to the one tackled in It Follows as it expounds on the idea of instilling fear of each other in queer adolescents who are already uneasy and frightened about their own emerging sexual identities. Naim and Ryan are cursed not to evade a shapeless entity that could manifest in any way it pleases, but one that will always look like someone they desire and love the most. Rooted in truly insidious pray-the-gay-away brainwashing tactics, Leviticus wants to tackle something that’s fundamentally profound and filter it through a genre lens that thematically brushes shoulders with It Follows.

However, there is a difference between a potentially great idea located in an intriguing and under-explored setting and its reduction to practice. While the activation energy needed to make an indie horror might be sufficiently low these days (and it’s a defensible position to argue that it has always been low) that a reasonably coherent idea and a fire in your belly are enough to push a movie over the line, making a good horror is a wholly different proposition, especially when the project is not trying to coexist with camp slashers laden with practical special effects and mounds of devotion to the art of building a plane as you’re taking off. Leviticus tries to look and feel serious while it shifts its weight onto themes, atmosphere and dread of the kind found in the now overpopulated substrata of elevated horror. And I have to say that despite an interesting first impression, the film loses its freshness at a rapid rate with each passing minute; like a fillet of trout left unattended on a window sill on a scorching July afternoon. By the end—and thankfully the movie has enough grace to wind its operations down before things get truly rancid—it borders on the unbearable.

Even though some of its initial scare tactics and visual ideas are firmly informed by its setting and the mood of the setup—the forced ritual of queer renouncement is aptly disturbing and the concept of the entity taking the form of someone you know adds tension to the story—Leviticus just doesn’t seem to find a good way to evolve the story past its premise and to drive it towards a conclusion the filmmaker clearly had in mind from the get-go. Plot points are clumsily stitched together and elements of exposition are ladled so awkwardly that you can’t help but shake your head in utter disbelief at how a movie with an idea this good could settle for resolutions found in novels aimed at thirteen-year-olds. We get to learn about everything from someone at a hospital who then conveniently loses her mind, Naim is locked out of a bus for no other reason than to initiate a scare, his mum is conveniently absent when we need to be frightened and the movie eventually begins jumping between settings in such a haphazard manner that it could convince some wannabe essayist to write a piece about the movie’s “intended” dream logic.

Put succinctly, Leviticus does not exhibit enough fundamental storytelling intelligence to match the ambition of its themes, which presents insurmountable friction. Consequently, it all registers as embarrassingly fake and almost childish, thus reminding us all that the filmmakers who have put this movie together weren’t all that experienced in the first place and maybe they bit more than they could chew. In effect, instead of feeling like a worthy offshoot of It Follows and an accomplished example of an elevated horror subgenre, Leviticus once again confirms that this trend has run out of road. As I said in the beginning, if there is anything this film achieves it is to remind everyone that It Follows is a movie worth revisiting instead of paying to watch its unfocused ersatz that doesn’t have enough momentum and wits to follow through on its own, inarguably solid, premise.