Leviticus
It is an outback town of barbed wired fences, shut-down mills and closed minds, electricity pylons stretching to the promise of a distant horizon which can never be reached, Naim Reid and his mother Arlene having moved following the death of his father and her desire to be around people who believed, the local community as pious and devout as only those who live in isolation can be, any hint of defiance or deviation met with firm retribution.
The sole bright spark in Naim’s life his schoolmate Ryan Whelan, blonde, handsome and confident where Naim is slender and awkward, their relationship beyond the distance they maintain in the classroom a secret until Naim sees Ryan kissing Hunter, the pastor’s son; hurt and lashing out, he tells Hunter’s parents who arrange for a ritual to cleanse the boys of their sin, unleashing a darkness which pursues them, Naim witness as Hunter is dragged into shadow and killed.
Australian horror a breed apart, the tropes familiar but shaped by cultural isolation and indigenous factors and inverted on the bottom of the world, the country which produced Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Babadook and in more recent years Talk to Me, Saccharine and Penny Lane is Dead now explores the defiant outcasts cursed by Leviticus, feature debut of writer and director Adrian Chiarella who pushes Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen out of the closet into the harsh sun.
Pariahs in their small town which sees them as fair game and preyed upon by something which mimics that which they desire the most, after the death of Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), the authorities unmoved to investigate based on Naim’s unconvincing report of an invisible assailant despite the evidence of a dismembered body, they hear of someone else who was forced to undergo the same ritual, Jessica (Shannon Berry), whose girlfriend died at the swimming pool where she worked, now living in fear and camped out at a hospital emergency room, proximity to people offering a measure of safety.
Bird and Clausen stripped raw, no one to turn to and trust between them burned to ash, the thing which haunts them wearing the face of the other, getting closer until it cannot be escaped, Leviticus is a body horror of borrowed identities, betrayal, guilt, isolation and the cruelty of organised religion, Arlene (Stoker‘s Mia Wasikowska) aware what is happening to her son but believing it to be for the greater good, his suffering bringing him closer to God.
An ambiguous film, Naim and Ryan both having hurt each other, rejected by their families, attempting to outrun the thing which follows them even as it masters the disguise it wears to fool them, is it the undying fire of prejudice they are trying to escape, the only possible safety in busy places, among crowds, preferably of their own kind, leaving the small town poisoned by bigotry to attempt to survive in the city, always keeping one eye on the road behind them to see what keeps pace.
Leviticus will be on general release from Wednesday 2nd September
