Name: Leviticus
Director: Adrian Chiarella
Genre: Horror
Released: 2026-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 88 min
Cast: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska, Nicholas Hope, Ewen Leslie

The most frightening thing in Leviticus is not the entity that stalks its two teenage protagonists. It is the arithmetic of a community that has decided the love between them is a contagion to be burned out. Adrian Chiarella’s first feature sets a supernatural horror inside a small, devout Australian town, and lets the two halves of that phrase, supernatural and devout, bleed into each other until you cannot say which one is doing the haunting.

The premise turns on one of horror’s oldest tools, the double. The thing pursuing Naim and Ryan does not arrive with claws or a mask. It takes the shape of the person each of them desires most, which is to say it takes the shape of the other boy. Desire and dread become a single silhouette. The genre has reached for this conceit before, from the doppelgängers of silent German cinema to the shape-shifting paranoia of its Cold War classics, but Chiarella ties it to a specific institutional cruelty: a town, a faith, and the machinery of conversion.

The casting tells you what kind of film this wants to be. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, as Naim and Ryan, are unknowns, and the film is built to keep them that way; their faces carry no prior associations, so the camera can treat them as ordinary boys rather than stars slumming in genre. The single recognizable presence, Mia Wasikowska, is placed not among the teenagers but above them, as Naim’s emotionally shuttered mother, Arlene. It is a pointed inversion. The marquee name plays the adult world the boys are trying to survive, the face of a parental tenderness that has curdled into something close to fear.

Chiarella arrives without a feature behind him, which makes the control on display as much the story of the film as the plot is. Leviticus played Sundance’s midnight strand, the slot reserved for horror that wants to be taken seriously, and was bought out of the festival by Neon, the distributor that has spent recent years turning festival genre titles into the year’s conversation. The lineage he writes into is a rich one: the religious horror that locates evil inside the sanctuary rather than outside it, and the newer wave of queer horror that has stopped treating the closet as subtext and started treating it as the monster’s hunting ground. It is hard to watch the early stretches without recalling the long tradition of the sympathetic-monster picture, in which the creature and the persecuted child turn out to be the same wounded thing.

What gives the film its charge is the way the metaphor refuses to stay comfortable. An entity that wears the face of your desire is, on one level, a perfect literalization of how shame operates. You are taught to see the thing you love as the thing that will destroy you, until the two can no longer be told apart. The town’s answer is a deliverance healer, a figure out of folk-Christian exorcism, and the film is clear-eyed about the fact that his cure and the curse are doing the same work. Both want the boys to stop being who they are.

That clarity is also where Leviticus exposes itself to the obvious objection. A horror film about conversion practices runs the constant risk of aestheticizing the harm it means to indict, of turning real institutional violence into atmosphere, jump-scares and beautiful gloom. The conceit is elegant, and elegance can flatten. A monster that so neatly equals desire can let a specific, documented cruelty dissolve into allegory. A first-time director working in a register this controlled has also not yet shown whether he can land the back half of a feature, where premises of this kind tend either to deepen or to collapse. A trailer’s mood is not a third act, and a seven-figure festival sale is a bet on potential, not a verdict on the finished film.

Around the two leads, Chiarella fills the town with recognizable Australian character actors. Nicholas Hope plays the deliverance healer, with Ewen Leslie, Tyallah Bullock, Davida McKenzie, Jeremy Blewitt and Julia Grace among the credited principals alongside Wasikowska. Set in the flat, sun-bleached light of a regional Australian town, the film leans on that landscape as much as on its cast, the open country offering nowhere for two boys to hide and a community whose church has a long reach. The film runs a lean eighty-eight minutes, and Neon is handling the release.

Leviticus premiered in the midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival in early 2026 and reaches United States theaters on June 19, 2026, a day after opening in the director’s native Australia on June 18. No Swedish or wider international theatrical dates have been confirmed at the time of writing. Whether it proves a genuine addition to the queer-horror canon or a well-shot idea that outpaces its own film, it arrives as one of the sharper genre debuts of the year, a haunting that knows exactly which institution it means to accuse.