[This story contains spoilers for Leviticus.]
Leviticus writer-director Adrian Chiarella sensed a shift in the world’s acceptance and tolerance toward the LGBTQIA+ community. From rights rollbacks to the return of inflammatory rhetoric, the Australian filmmaker decided to write something that could potentially help people better understand the experience of a queer teenager facing homophobia and the threat of conversion therapy.
Partially based on his own experiences with institutionalized bigotry, Chiarella crafted his feature directorial debut, Leviticus, a horror romance in which two Australian teenage boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), are subjected to a ritual that weaponizes their attraction for one another. An entity stalks them and hurts them more and more if they don’t stay away from each other, and the added rub is that the malevolent force takes on their respective appearances. As a result, they constantly question whether the Naim or Ryan in front of them is the genuine article.
Getting into spoilers, Naim and his widowed mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska), only recently moved to the small religious factory town that introduced Naim and Ryan. The rural Australia setting allowed Arlene to dive deeper into her newfound faith following the death of her husband. When she catches wind of Naim’s fondness for Ryan, she recruits the same “deliverance healer” that already cursed Ryan.
Chiarella frames Arlene’s involvement as if she’s unaware of how dangerous this malediction truly is. When Naim tries to confide in her, she downplays his cries for help. But then the third act reveals that she knew exactly what she was inflicting on her son and that the curse could not be undone.
“As I was writing a movie about this entity that makes you question whether you can trust that the person you love is in front of you or not, I discovered that’s the overall theme with all of the characters. They’re all people who are not what they seem to be,” Chiarella tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s quite a harsh ending in terms of the mother-son relationship, but having seen a lot of films about conversion therapy, they all seem to give the parents this miraculously redemptive ending.”
The film ends with Naim and Ryan leaving their families behind and departing on a bus. And while their mutual threat is still out there, Chiarella concludes their haunting love story on a more hopeful note. Many young queer people have had to cut ties with their disapproving families in similar fashion, but Chiarella expresses an optimistic outlook for Naim and Arlene.
“The truth is, when parents put their kids through these sorts of experiences, it takes a long time for those relationships to mend,” Chiarella says. “We’re only looking at one little window in Naim and his mother’s lives. Maybe there’s some point in the future where they do connect again.”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Chiarella also discusses how Talk to Me factored into the development of Leviticus, as well as the casting of Bird.
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Well, it’s quite a time to release a horror movie. Do you view it as a rising tide situation?
Yeah, I do. Horror comes in waves. There’s always been periods where it’s really, really taken off. Then it goes away for a little bit, but it always comes back like the monsters in its stories. So it does feel like a really incredible moment. I loved Backrooms and Obsession, and I loved seeing them with packed young audiences. That was also happening in the theaters at home in Australia, and what made it even more exciting was seeing the trailer for my film play before both of those movies.
Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen as Naim and Ryan in Adrian Chiarelal’s Leviticus.
Did Team Leviticus ever cross paths with Team Obsession on the festival circuit?
No, I don’t think so. They premiered a little before us at Toronto, and we didn’t really screen till Sundance. I was at Sundance for quite a while, but since then, a lot of us on the festival circuit just dip in to show our films and head out. So we haven’t crossed paths yet, but hopefully one day. I’m just in awe of that film. [Writer’s Note: That day came soon as Obsession star Michael Johnston moderated a Q&A for Leviticus a few days after this interview.]
Was a Pride month release discussed around the time of the acquisition at Sundance?
Yeah, it was definitely something that Neon was very excited to do. So there’s a lot of events where we can screen the film and bring the community together, which has been very special so far.
What was the first domino to fall en route to Leviticus’ premise of fearing the person you desire most?
This is not one of those films where I can pinpoint the exact day when the idea hit me. But I had been wanting to do a film about homophobia for a long time. In Australia, I’d noticed there was this real regression in a lot of our rights in the LGBTQIA+ community, and from what I’ve heard from people who live in the U.S., it’s a similar situation. A lot of this quite toxic language and rhetoric has returned, particularly in the political space, so I wanted to do something about that.
I also wanted to do a film that was a little more personal, so I started thinking about the kinds of films that I liked to watch when I was a teenager. When I was struggling with my own feelings and struggling with homophobia myself, I looked to a lot of horror movies for comfort in those days. Then I discovered, as I grew up, that I wasn’t alone in that. A lot of other queer young people did the same.
I then started asking myself, What is it about the themes in these films and the way they explore otherness and that feeling of destabilization when you’re on this journey to self-discovery? What is the metaphor for young people being chased by monsters really about? That’s when I decided, Well, if horror movies are about fear, then let’s explore homophobia as a type of fear. What is the fear that could be instilled within the characters in this world? And then I realized, Well, if they’re scaring people out of their desires, it should be an entity or a horror movie monster that looks like the person you’re most attracted to.
It Follows was a touchstone throughout the process, but what were some of those earlier films that likely had a hand in this?
John Carpenter’s The Thing is a film I’d watched when I was very young. It contains the idea of not being able to separate between the self and the other, and having that sense of confusion and terror over not knowing if the real person in front of you. In an obtuse or obscure way, I looked at Solaris, the [Andrei] Tarkovsky movie because of this idea of being haunted by a memory. That was something that helped me when I started thinking about where I was really going to go with this concept, particularly in the second half. I started thinking about how the more time you spend with the real person, the entity that resembles them gets stronger. The entity or a being can feed off your memories of a particular person that’s special to you, and it made me think of Solaris. So I went back and rewatched it.
For any uninitiated readers, the title is a reference to the Old Testament’s Book of Leviticus. It refers to homosexuality as an “abomination.” 20:13 also says,“They shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” At the risk of asking the obvious, were those verses early jumping-off points as well?
Yeah, I was absolutely jumping off those from the start. In fact, from the very, very first draft of the script, there was a scene right near the beginning where Ewen Leslie’s character, the Pastor, gave a sermon where he quoted some of those passages from Leviticus.
But right near the end of the edit, a good friend, a very wise filmmaker, pointed out: “Maybe you don’t need to explain that to the audience. You already come into this with an assumption that this community does not appreciate how these two young men feel about each other. And if you don’t explain that, then you put yourself ahead of the audience the tiny bit that you need to be. You also get to the horror earlier as well.” The [latter] is something that we all wanted to do while we were in the edit. We wanted to strike that balance between the love story and the horror, but the sooner we could get to that first deliverance healer scene, the better we felt about the film.
In your case, is the film more emotionally true than it is experientially true? Were you subjected to any kind of conversion therapy?
I didn’t have religious parents, but I went to a religious school. I did experience homophobia, not only from the kids at the school, but from a more institutionalized point of view in terms of passages and things being said to us at school assemblies and in classrooms.
Joe Bird as Naim in Leviticus.
You wrote the film through a state-supported program within VicScreen, and you were going to make it on a micro budget until Causeway opted to join the fold at a higher budget level. That must’ve been a major moment for you given the recent success of Talk to Me. Did producers Samantha Jennings and Kristina Ceyton lobby for Joe Bird given their history with him on that film?
Sam and Kristina at Causeway are very much about honoring the director’s vision and process before anything else. So they would never come into any decision by putting their foot down and saying, “Well, we think it should be this.” They always want to hear what the director thinks first. That came down to my preference for heads of department and who I wanted to cast. Of course, they’re ultimately going to have a very big say in that, but they don’t come in swinging with an insistence that we go in a particular direction or anything.
In terms of Joe, his audition was thrown in with everybody else’s, and it wasn’t until I had said, “You know what? I think Joe Bird is a real frontrunner for this role.” I talked about the extraordinary truth that he was bringing to this character, and then Sam Jennings said, “Okay, let me tell you about what an amazing actor he is. Let me tell you about how open and available and generous he was when he was 14 on Talk to Me.” So that’s the point when we started chatting about him.
I’d known Causeway, Sam and Kristina, for about ten years. Back in 2022 or 2023, they just asked me, “What are you working on? We’d love to read some samples of your work.” And I said, “Oh, I’ve got this one, but it’s already in a program being made on a micro budget.” And literally a few weeks after Talk to Me came out, they said, “We’ve read it now, and we’d love to talk about it.”
They knew that I have a very grounded filmmaking style and that I would want to cast young actors, not 25-year-olds pretending to be teenagers. That’s when they said, “You are making a very ambitious film that has a concept that we think is worthy of a big audience. If you want to work with young actors, you’re going to need a proper schedule so that you’re not rushed. That’s the main reason why you should consider working with us at a bigger budget.”
You sent Joe and co-star Stacy Clausen out into the real world for a character exercise, and someone recognized Joe as the “Talk to Me kid.” He stayed in character, though?
He did! He just kept going. I had to cast Joe first because, in terms of chemistry, we needed to cast the rest of the community of characters around him. So he was cast about six months before we started shooting.
We had a lot of conversations about what his own experiences as a teenager felt like. We talked about the experience of making Talk to Me — and suddenly being recognized on the street, and having his face on T-shirts — changed not only his perception of the world, but also the way people behaved around him. So he’s just a really wise person, and he was able to really understand what was going on around him because of that.
What’s the story behind Mia Wasikowska’s casting as Naim’s widowed single mother (Arlene)? Did financiers need a name?
She loved the script, and I really liked her. I’d never seen her play a mother before, and I don’t think we’ve even seen her carry a baby on screen. I’d seen some of the recent indie films she’d done like Bergman Island and Club Zero, and I realized that she’s at a stage in her life where she could believably play a mother who had a kid when she was a bit younger. That just felt like the right choice as a character.
Then Mia read the script, and even though it’s not a very big role, she’s since said to me that she just really wanted to support this story. There are some actors that choose a part because of the scale of the part or because they get to do certain things. But there are also some amazing actors like Mia who just want to support a good story, and they don’t care how big or small their role is within that.
Naim (Bird) and Arlene (Wasikowska) are new to this religious factory town. Arlene became religious in response to her husband’s death from a terminal illness. Did you ever ponder Naim’s relationship dynamic with his father?
Yeah, Joe and I talked about that. I think it was that he was actually a little closer to his dad and that it was quite a great loss for him. So there was some grief that he was still battling, and we talked about things like the ring that he carries being something from his father. So it was definitely something that I wanted Joe to carry the weight of in the story.
When Naim sees Ryan (Clausen) being haunted for the first time, Ryan confirms at the hockey rink that the entity is appearing to him as Naim. Thus, Naim was always the one he desired most. So why did Ryan bother with Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt) when Naim was his utmost desire? Just teenagers being teenagers?
I had some backstory and scenes that explained how Hunter and Ryan had a bit of history. They’d grown up in this town together, and they had this ritual of battling their feelings by throwing stuff at each other. It’s an exchange they’d had for a long time. But Ryan then discovers that he could actually explore intimacy in a more genuine way with Naim.
On the ride back from the hospital, Naim and Ryan have a moment in the back of the bus, and Naim’s hand makes streaks on the bus window’s condensation. Did you manufacture that condensation yourselves? Or did it happen to be there?
It was just there on the day, but I’d also remind everybody that it takes a lot of people to make a shot. Even when you’re doing a closed set with a moment of intimacy like that, there’s a lot of people. So what you’re not seeing is a whole bunch of guys who were camera-right, and it was mostly all the bodies on the bus that caused the condensation. It wasn’t something that I intended. It was a happy accident.
Stacy Clausen’s Ryan and Joe Bird’s Naim in Leviticus.
How would you describe your experience working with an intimacy coordinator?
Amy Cater is someone I’d known for a while. She’d worked on a lot of other friends’ projects, and I knew that everybody really trusted and respected her. I knew that working with an intimacy coordinator would be really important on this one. We were not only working with young actors, but the intimacy was also just so intrinsic to the love story and the horror movie.
So I needed to work with her to figure out how the intimacy would lead into these moments of dread and violence — and to make sure that she could work hand in hand with our stunt coordinator on particular intimacy scenes that transition into a stunt. Sometimes, that would happen very swiftly within the scene, so we’d have to change the environment a little bit. We’d either have to close the set down for an intimacy scene, or, if the characters were suddenly getting really violent, we’d have to bring in all of the stunt people for safety. All of that, logistically, was quite complicated.
Amy also helped us with a lot of dramaturgy around Stacy Clausen’s embodiment of this entity or monster. She helped shape his emotional interiority, how he was going to move and what his face was going to do when the mask dropped.
Did you ever have a scene where Naim appeared as the entity from Ryan’s point of view?
Not in practice, but I did have a version of the script where we shifted perspectives. It muddied the idea of the story, though. It also didn’t allow us to really delve into the psychology of Naim’s guilt and regret over going to the pastor and telling his community about Hunter and Ryan.
Nicholas Hope as the “Deliverance Healer” in Leviticus.
(Spoiler Warning.) A lot of screenwriters would have Naim and Ryan track down the deliverance healer and rough him up until he says the curse is irreversible. They did try to track him down, but Hunter’s sister set them up for a beating, if not worse. Instead, you had Naim’s mom deliver the news that the curse is irreversible, making her more complicit than we originally thought. It hurts far more that the parent knew they were playing with ritualistic fire and gave the go-ahead anyway.
As I was writing a movie about this entity that makes you question whether you can trust that the person you love is in front of you or not, I discovered that’s the overall theme with all of the characters. They’re all people who are not what they seem to be, whether that’s the pastor’s daughter/Hunter’s sister, or Naim’s mother, something he realizes at the end. It’s quite a harsh ending in terms of the mother-son relationship, but having seen a lot of films about conversion therapy, they all seem to give the parents this miraculously redemptive ending.
The truth is, when parents put their kids through these sorts of experiences, it takes a long time for those relationships to mend. It does take quite a few years to heal, and this film takes place over a very short space of time. We’re only looking at one little window in Naim and his mother’s lives. Maybe there’s some point in the future where they do connect again, but that revelation just felt like it was the way to end this particular chapter for them.
In a perfect world, what would you do next?
Leviticus happened quite quickly. Once Causeway got involved, we worked really intensively to polish the script, and we basically received financing as soon as we were all happy with it. Then the film got into Sundance before we were even finished, and the film sold to Neon before we left Sundance. So that’s quite a speedy path for any director, and I’ve still got a few projects that I’m trying to develop a little further.
I certainly have loved working within a genre and playing with the audience’s expectations around that genre in the ways that you pointed out. Rather than having the boys hunt down the deliverance healer, we have the moment with the mother instead. So the next project might be another horror movie, or it might be a sci-fi or a Western or a thriller, but I know that I’ll work within whatever genre in that same way.
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Leviticus is now playing in movie theaters.
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