Leviticus (2026)

Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus arrives from Sundance with a monster that wears the face of the boy you love, which is a tidy piece of engineering. Two teenagers in an evangelical Victorian town, Naim and Ryan, conduct a secret romance until a jealous act of outing delivers them to a deliverance healer and a ritual that convulses, purges, and fails. The entity that follows is not subtle in its metaphor. It is loneliness with teeth. The film's romantic leads are both boys, and the entire emotional load rests on their shoulders, which is a casting decision and a narrative one at once. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen carry it without flinching.

The horror here is theological, not economic. No one in this town is crushed by markets or landlords. They are crushed by Leviticus, by parents who believe suffering is a form of love, and by a healer who sells deliverance by the hour. Arlene, Izzie, and the detective move the plot along, though none of them are asked to argue a thesis about womanhood. Naim's name suggests a family from somewhere other than rural Victoria, and the film lets that sit without commentary. Race is not its subject. Sexuality is, entirely and unapologetically, and the exorcism sequences make the point through the body instead of the pulpit.

The film declines to lecture. There is no scene where a character explains the moral of the story to the audience, and critics have noted the restraint. The allegory does the work. No climate anxiety, no class warfare, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no historical revision. Just two boys, a bus ticket, and something invisible that wants them dead. It is a lean, patient piece of genre filmmaking. The credits roll on Frank Ocean, which is its own kind of benediction.