Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus arrives with the kind of Sundance pedigree and critical reception that can set expectations to an untenable height. Lucky for audiences, it mostly justifies the buzz; key word, mostly.
At a brisk 88 minutes, Leviticus is refreshingly unburdened by the origin-story bloat that plagues so much of contemporary horror. That may be due in part to the film needing the real estate to develop a genuine coming-of-age romance. There is no labored mythology, no third-act exposition dump explaining the rules of the haunting. Where something like Smile loses itself spelunking for the source of its evil, Chiarella makes quick work of the supernatural logic and trusts the audience to keep up.
That confidence is one of the film’s best qualities. It is also, paradoxically, part of its problem. The efficiency that gives the film its momentum also leaves certain narrative threads hanging, and by the end, the story hasn’t quite cohered into something airtight. But when are films like this ever airtight?
Where the film earns its reputation is in its central conceit. The entity haunting the two boys takes the form of whoever the other desires most…each other. It’s a genuinely smart literalization of queer shame punished by religion: the thing that threatens to destroy them is inseparable from the thing they want. However, the entity’s central mechanic throughout the film — the doubt of is this really him? — to generate paranoia within the characters and the viewing audience, is seldom pulled off.
The doppelgänger tension that should keep you guessing and on edge is, in most instances, frustratingly easy to read. Maybe then it feels like the film needed to flash its genre credentials through bouts of extreme physical violence to justify the more restrained psychological work carrying the rest of the runtime.
All that said, I’m impressed with these new faces in horror, in front and behind the camera. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen do more-than-solid work as our two leads. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins also lifts up the atmosphere across the film: sparse spaces, washed-out color, disciplined lighting that makes every frame modulate from tender to uneasy.
Leviticus is an imperfect but genuinely promising debut. It’s sharp in its ideas, uneven in its execution, but absolutely worth your 88 minutes.
