April 2026 is doing that thing where you watch a film and then you can’t stop hearing what it’s talking about. Leviticus—just that title, blunt and unbothered—arrives as the Overlook Film Festival 2026’s centerpiece, and it feels less like entertainment and more like a verdict.
Horror and the politics of ritual
Sitting with it in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision clearing the way for conversion therapy practices to continue in states that sought to limit them, Leviticus stops feeling like metaphor and starts feeling like a living document.
The horror isn’t hypothetical; it’s ritual.
You can’t unsee it, even when the rooms in the film don’t look like the ones you’ve walked into.
They don’t need to.
The function is the same.
The setup is clean and devastating.
Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are teenage boys in an isolated, conservative Christian community in rural Victoria, Australia, quietly falling for each other in the way first love actually works—glances, proximity, that specific charge of being seen by someone who wants you too.
Then the pastor discovers it.
The community’s response is a “deliverance” ritual meant to cure them.
It goes catastrophically wrong for the boys, and—here’s the most awful pivot—cosmically right for the community that believes homosxuality should be prevented at all costs.
An entity is released, arriving in the form of the person they love thez most.
The monster is desire itself, weaponized by shame.
The relationship at the center is what keeps the film from collapsing into allegory, at least for me.
Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen have chemistry that reads as genuine—almost painfully sweet—so the horror mechanics land harder because you’ve actually bought the sweetness first.
Cinematographer Tyson Perkins shoots with quiet intimacy that shifts registers seamlessly into dread.
This is a quiet film, and at one point someone says God is in that silence.
Even the sound design seems to understand it, letting you squirm in the gaps.
I remember the way the theater air felt—like stale popcorn and cold seats—and how the film used that contrast to push you closer to the discomfort.
Frogs, snakes, and the machinery of harm
The second ritual sequence is brutal—difficult to shake—and it’s executed with one technical choice so specific and confident it almost dares you to look away.
Well-intentioned adults complicate things in a way that feels accurate, not convenient.
Perkins repeatedly frames scenes through an industrial landscape, and I’m from the midwest; the town feels eeriely familar to me.
I recognize the toxicity dressed up as productivity, the class desperation thrust upon a generation trying to bargain with its own happiness.
Hell, I’m old enough to remember when a politician made a comment about clinging to guns and religion and was excoriated for it.
Obama would dig this film—maybe.
Actually, I’m not sure.
But the film’s understanding of how power styles itself as moral necessity?
That part is crystal.
Leviticus is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a very long time, and it ends with a decidely upbeat and optimistic tone.
It isn’t lost on me that there are queer elements I’m missing.
I’m a cis gendered straight white guy, which is… not a neutral perspective.
That said, being a teenager is hard right now, and love makes a lot of it bearable.
Our monsters may never leave us, but maybe living an authentic life can keep them at bay for awhile.
Leviticus opens in the US on June 19.
Mia Wasikowska, Ewen Leslie, and Nicholas Hope round out a cast that understands exactly what kind of film they’re in.
This is a brilliant first work from a very confident director—Chiarella is one to watch.
And you can already feel the conversation starting to sharpen, whether people want it to or not.
Social media’s shift: what now for museums and cultural institutions?