Leviticus (2026) Movie Review

Movie Review: Leviticus

The age-old genre of religious conversion therapy horror. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s actually a legitimate genre, even though there are films that cover that content. Leviticus is a new horror-ish Aussie film that is powerful in premise, but what about the execution?

Two teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most: each other.

We’ve got Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen as Naim and Ryan, respectively. They’re two gay teenagers who are beginning a relationship despite both of their families attending a semi-fundamentalist Christian-ish church that absolutely forbids same-sex attraction. When it’s discovered that they are forming a relationship, an old, sketchy priest/biker dude comes in and performs some sort of ritual, which in reality turns out to be more of a curse than anything redemptive or spiritually kind.

A Slow-Burn Nightmare

This is a very slow-burn type of a story, and I don’t use that in the boring sense of the word. For a movie that’s not even 90 minutes, the plot takes its time to show the growing feelings between the two young men. Although it doesn’t spend an exorbitant amount of time on their coupling, there is enough to see the connection and feel for it. But once the deliverance preacher comes into the picture, the tension and anxiety ramp way up as things get trippy, violent, and turn into a sort of abhorrent guessing game.

While this may start off at a slower pace, the movie steadily becomes a thrillingly depressing, traumatic journey of torment for the characters. Just as the brief synopsis stated, once the old dude does his witchy magic on the boys, they are tormented by a force or a being that can only be seen by them, which also takes the form of whoever they most desire, and then brings on some gnarly violence.

Religious Hypocrisy and Familial Cruelty

This is where the story holds most of its weight and commentary. While the religious sect we see is some form of what’s assumed to be Christianity, this is more about pointing out the hypocrisy and irony of any organized religion that teaches peace and forgiveness, yet makes those they disagree with out to be abominations worthy only of strife, punishment, and even death. That portion comes through loud and clear.

It’s hard to watch, especially as we see the decisions of parents play out on their children. Mia Wasikowska plays Naim’s mom, and there comes this point where she voices a revelation that just made my skin crawl. She epitomizes in this one sentence everything the movie shows but doesn’t say out loud. It’s disgusting.

Undercooked Lore

Despite these unspoken actions that dominate so much of the storytelling, one large area stood out to me as lacking: the whole lore behind the conversion horror.

This isn’t a movie about kidnapping children in the middle of the night and taking them to some heinous camp environment where they’re tortured and tormented in a false effort to pray the gay away. There are other films, and even documentaries, about those, which I think are horrors in and of themselves just thanks to the content. Here, though, there isn’t mention of some camp or really even the biblical book of Leviticus. The lore especially when it comes to what the deliverance preacher does to the boys is utterly vague and lacking.

The only biblical inference to Leviticus comes from a few words the priest dude mutters about Moses’ brother Aaron and how his sons disobeyed God. From there, the dialogue becomes indecipherable. Had the lore only been *semi*-vague, I wouldn’t have minded it as much. But because the entire horror element rests on the actions of the preacher, not having any background on what he’s done just feels undercooked—as if the writing didn’t have a firm grasp on exactly how they wanted to frame the tormentor, so they just didn’t.

This doesn’t take away from the visual nightmares that we watch play out on the characters. They’re freaky and un-settling, and they make you question everything that they see. But the only thing I can surmise read here, *heavily assume* is that the preacher man cast some sort of curse to redeem these perceived sinners.

Selective Morality

Another area I think the film neglected to draw more attention to is the entire religious hypocrisy angle. Sure, we can take away what I mentioned before. that for people claiming to be all about forgiveness, they’re always at the ready to condemn and not forgive. But to dive even more deeply into the whole Leviticus thing, that biblical book is filled with all sorts of rules that Christians continuously pick and choose from on what they want to uphold or throw in others’ faces.

Take tattoos, for example. That book says that people are not to mark their skin with tattoos. As somebody who grew up in the church and obviously has visible tattoos, this was said out loud to me multiple times. But what these self-righteous, pious hypocrites failed to adhere to comes in the verses directly around the whole thing about tattoos—and that is that men are not to trim the hair on their temples or trim their beards. Yeah. That’s just one quick example, but there are so many more that are used as spiritual ammunition against anyone a believer wants to try and shame, all while ignoring the plethora of other rules that they themselves are violating. Within this movie in particular, the deliverance preacher guy is all tatted up, which made me chuckle incredulously at the outright duplicity.

The Danger of Exploiting Trauma

I think where this film might struggle the most isn’t in the focus on the message and its ability to showcase how society—and religion in particular works to constrain people they don’t agree with into some normalized box that actually isn’t normal at all. To try and change someone and something that can’t be changed is cruel and delusional, and the story nails that portion expertly.

But in the process, the story exploits gay trauma as it delivers its point. Just like with other works utilizing Black trauma to provide social critique, it can be too much focus on the horrific aspects and not enough on how to break the cycles that are inflicted on these recipients.

Final Verdict

Overall, this is a strong and impactful story that is filled with touching and believable emotional connections while also delving into some loathsome religious hypocrisies that lead to unimaginable suffering and horrors. The actors deliver stirring performances, simultaneously filled with passion and terror for what unseen violence is lurking to attack.

The lore angle is bare bones and could benefit from more depth, and the commentary on religious insincerity and bigotry deserved a harsher examination. But what we’re left with is still haunting and effective, albeit with a small dash of hope to hopefully lessen the melancholy.

Rating: I give *Leviticus 3.5 out of 5 couches.

So, are there any other religious themed horrors you’ve seen that made an impact? Let me know in the comments below!