#298: WHAT IF SHAME BECAME A MONSTER?  Set in Victoria, Australia, under a wide-open landscape of smoke-belching industrial chimneys and bleak skies, Adrian Chiarella in his new film “Leviticus” takes all the tropes of horror movies—ominous pauses, horrified stares, and some very nasty business going on just offscreen—and aims them at two teen-aged boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen).  We first see them in an abandoned warehouse, doing a little smoking and snogging; their pleasure in each other, their relief at being able to take off their social masks, is immediate and convincing.  Later, Naim sees Ryan flirting with another boy, Hunter, the pastor’s son; wounded, he rats them out, and Ryan and Hunter are subjected to a very ominous faith-healing ritual by their church community—lots of low-voiced praying and a lighter flame held up to the boys’ faces.  Hunter at first seems merely a bit cowed and embarrassed; Ryan is hardly able to conceal a smirk.  But we see their faces change, and a lost, drained expression comes on them, and they fall to the floor in violent fits.  Even the church people are unprepared for this, and Naim, terrified and guilty, leaves at a dead run.

       What has happened, it turns out, is that the boys’ fear and shame has broken loose, taken shape and begins to stalk them.  And the shape it takes—logically enough—is whomever they most desire.  Naim himself, confessing to his feelings for Ryan, is subjected to the ceremony as well, and it’s here we begin to see how the attitudes of the families around them are being portrayed. Naim’s mother (Mia Wasikovska) turns her son over to the exorcists almost unapologetically; later on she announces to him simply, “I can’t help you.”  Homosexuality in “Leviticus” is seen by the community not merely as shameful or weak, but evil: a malignant thing, a contaminant. Mark Kermode online suggested that “Leviticus” is doing more openly what horror movies have been doing for ages, subverting our notions of what must be rejected and expelled.  The exorcism works as a straight-up metaphor for gay conversion therapy, but it also leads into the terror of what follows, much of it coming from each boy’s uncertainty if who he’s seeing is friend or fiend.   “It’s what they wanted,” Ryan says. “Us to be afraid of each other.”  That’s putting it mildly.

       Chiarella’s script is fast and packed: we know a lot of what’s doing in a few establishing shots, the sparsely populated landscapes, and the laconic dialogue.  Humor, of a kind, sneaks in: a scene with an hysterical Naim seeking help in a convenience store is pure Australian flat affect.  Ryan, dissuading Naim from separating from him, says “If I have to live with this, I don’t want it to look like some other dickhead. I want it to look like you,” perhaps the most convoluted form of saying “I love you” ever filmed.  But the violence, when it comes, is worse than simply frightening, because it has the fragility of the boys’ romantic attachment behind it, and their sense of being abandoned: there's anguish in it, plus terror.  The film ends with the their reconciliation, just before that last image puts the ice down your spine.  There’s no kind of hate like the one you’ve learned to train on yourself.  An online review leads with the banner, “What if shame became a monster?”  “Leviticus” puts that right up there on the screen.

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