Naim (Joe Bird) has moved to a new town with his single mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska), and is struggling to make friends. One afternoon, he is invited by Ryan (Stacy Clausen) to go explore an old factory with him. After a bit of roughhousing, Ryan kisses Naim, a not-unwelcomed advance, and the two start a secret relationship away from the eyes of Pastor Rod (Ewen Leslie), whose religious influence is felt all throughout town. When they are found out, Ryan is sent to see a Deliverance Preacher (Nicholas Hope) so that his lustful thoughts can be cleansed.

Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus serves as his feature writing and directing debut; an 88-minute queer, romantic horror that was acquired by Neon after premiering in the Midnights section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Tapping into many of the social anxieties and using those stigmas as the root of the horror, Leviticus is at once a deeply felt yet surface-level examination of conversion therapy that could have been better served with even just five minutes more expanding the world of the film, but thankfully it eschews the low-hanging fruit of demonically personified trauma.

In a way, Leviticus, like most romances, is a two-hander with just a slightly wide enough lens to bring in some ancillary characters. As such, it lives and dies on the chemistry of its two young leads, who, with each having fewer than five feature roles on their resume, both rise to the challenge and bring the livewire excitement of acting on a crush mixed with a pining desire when they are forced to separate. Chiarella’s script is unique in this aspect as it plays the general arc almost in reverse, opening the film with the boys coming together only to put up the barriers later on in the narrative as they resort to glances from across the room or passing connections in the hallways of school which are often found in a smoldering first act and not in the body of the film.

While the film lacks the scope of Gone with the Wind (1939) or Casablanca (1942), it nevertheless belongs in conversation with its contemporaries: Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022) and Anthony Schatteman’s Young Hearts (2025) come to mind. Since Bird and Clausen are older than the pairs in both of those films, their relationship can get more explicit, yet Chiarella keeps his film entirely respectful and overwhelmingly chaste. He knows that there is more interesting emotional ground to be traversed in the longing than there necessarily is in the consummation. The result is the witnessing of wistful afternoons in the factory, lazing about, sharing a blunt, and being able to talk freely, but also later in the film, Chiarella uses barriers such as a storm door screen to great effect as the boys’ relationship becomes strained thanks to the supernatural entity sent to put them back on the path of righteousness.

The reverse-engineered structure of Chiarella’s script is rightfully admired; however, there is still a sparseness to the world that leaves the film feeling underdeveloped. Both Naim and Ryan are the most developed on the page, but they are still hardly characters on their own. To a degree, they share a personality switch as they navigate their lives post-conversion therapy, which finds Naim taking a more staunch and unafraid position in life as Ryan becomes meeker, but each of them are so thinly written, and the handful of people they interact with are reduced to their most basic roles; mother, sister (Davida McKenzie), classmate (Jeremy Blewitt), ect. To call it Wattpad fanfic is not totally fair as this is an original idea, but the world that is presented in Leviticus feels more like it was built on the assumption that audiences would be bringing their knowledge of these characters and this town to the cinema along with them. They are the only two characters that matter in this script, which is not inherently a bad thing, but it is a weakness in the writing that the wider ensemble is so loosely developed. Despite this, Chiarella still manages to sneak in a few dramatic surprises in his script, so while the characters may more or less be little more than familiar archetypes, Leviticus cannot be reduced to just another run-of-the-mill social horror film made in our modern free-love era.

He does this by sidestepping some of the more regular tropes that serve as checkpoints across our haunted narratives, namely, the boys do not seek so much how to destroy the demon that stalks them but to learn to live with it; to accept it as part of their lives. In this way, the film is not so much decrying the practice of conversion therapy – though, to be clear, this film is through and through a stern damnation of the practice – but a coming of age of two queer youths accepting a part of themselves which their environment had told them to keep hidden. Shot through the lens of drama, though physically shot through cinematographer Tyson Perkins’ lens, Leviticus is able to present this drama in a unique way that, with any luck, will only seem thinner and less daring as the bench of horror films only continues to deepen in the queer canon. In the here and now, however, Leviticus is a refreshing take on these tried-and-true themes of burgeoning identity.

One of the most interesting of the reframed themes of the film is the concept of a found family; a concept that can be sussed out reaching back to even the early days of queer cinema but has been having a bit of a boon lately with titles such as Luke Gilford’s National Anthem (2024) and Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025). The entity that stalks the boys by taking the form of whoever they find most attractive – in this case, each other – can be managed most cleanly when there is someone else around them to check if they can see the other person, too. Desperate to find that third-party sense check, the boys come up frightfully alone in their dusty conservative town. Arlene shrugs off Naim’s plea, and later the preacher’s daughter and fellow classmate betray the two boys, which, while harrowing, is not the most painful betrayal in the film. Through a pessimistic lens, the boys are on their own, but Chiarella does lay some groundwork to suggest a brighter future is ahead for them.

Before they can ride off together, however, they must first contend with the horror at hand. The more traditional horror elements of the film are some of its weakest moments, and while Chiarella’s choice to not follow the typical route of understanding and exorcising the demon or facing off against the deliverance healer in a third-act finale is a bold – and correct – move to make narratively, filmically, he underutilizes the conceit. Beguilingly enough, some of the high water marks in Leviticus do still come when it is peddling in its horror beats, but it feels like there were lots of moments that could have been expanded on that would have also helped to flesh out the world of the film. We experience the film almost exclusively through Naim’s perspective, so while it would be jarring to jump to Ryan’s experience – and thankfully, this is not a segregated dual-perspective film – Chiarella seems hesitant to give us much of Naim and the entity at all. The few scenes we do have are all quite simple, and while we learn all we need to know about the entity and how it operates, the scares become a bit cyclical, especially in the beginning, and Chiarella does not really let loose or have fun with this concept instead sticking to just the bare essentials. Horror often does loose its edge the more time we spend with the monster, fear of the unknown and all, but the concept of a demon that takes the form of who you are most attracted to let loose on a couple of angsty teens is a deep well to plumb both thematically and genre-wise, but we are only afforded a quick peak over the wall to see how deep it actually goes.

Chiarella should be commended, though, as Leviticus is still a highly enjoyable and engaging film, and his economical approach is countercurrent to the trend of bloated first-time features from filmmakers panicked that there may not be a second opportunity at bat. With great control over the tension and already a proven knack for working with and fostering chemistry between actors, Chiarella should not have to fear about not getting a second chance to tell his stories. Leviticus, scrappy to a fault, is still a great entry into the canon of both modern horror and modern queer stories, and is a great step in the right direction, showing that these stories and these films do not necessarily need to be considered mutually exclusive any longer. While queer themes have long been a part of horror stories, Leviticus almost feels like a celebration and a reclamation of identity in a way that queer-coded villains, nor the genre’s long list of gay victims, were. Queer people may carry the scars of bullying and betrayal with them, but Chiarella posits that they do not have to lie down and accept the ridicule and that there is a wide world just beyond those rural township limits; break the power that holds you down and walk with your head held high.