“It Follows” meets “Heated Rivalry” sounds like a reductive comparison for the totally original queer horror movie “Leviticus,” a Sundance 2026 smash hit about a forbidden romance amid small-town homophobia. But as a helpful entry point to getting butts in seats, we’ll take it — and we wrote it, anyway, in our Sundance review.
Just as “It Follows” felt like a revelation out of Cannes in 2014, the similarly sexually charged and specter-haunted “Leviticus” pronounces a bold new voice in horror: Adrian Chiarella. The Australian writer/director’s hugely entertaining and breathtakingly scary feature debut stars rising talents Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird as two teenage boys stalked by a violent entity that resembles the person they desire the most, and in this case, it’s each other. Watch the film‘s trailer below.
That entity’s origins have something to do with the Church located in the repressed, religious suburb Naim’s (Bird) just moved to with his mother, played by the brilliant Aussie actress Mia Wasikowska. (She’s slowly making her return more regularly to screens after retreating from Hollywood years ago.) The church offers a conversion therapy-like deliverance ceremony that’s led to Ryan (Clausen) being fully haunted by this shape-shifting menace, and so, of course, Naim is next.
The scares are real, but what anchors “Leviticus” is the young adult romance blooming between the two teenage boys — one capable of devastating and then terrifying you when suddenly you find yourself unsure of who is really who.
“I always wanted to reclaim this genre,” Chiarella told IndieWire at Sundance. “This is a horror movie, and I always felt like horror films were really shaped by queer writers for queer audiences, and in a lot of ways we were reclaiming that space. This is a film about two boys who fall in love, and about the community that tries to erase that feeling that they have for each other. And the curse that they unintentionally unleash.”
Neon opens “Leviticus” in theaters starting June 19. The film arrives in a summer of peak indie horror at the movies, from A24’s “Backrooms” (May 29) to Focus Features’ “Obsession” (May 15) and MUBI’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (August 7), directed by Jane Schoenbrun.
Check out the film’s first trailer below.
Source:
www.indiewire.com
