{The Overlook Film Festival 2026} Leviticus (2026)

I have found my favorite film of 2026 so far. Let’s start with the title. Leviticus. Not subtle, and its not trying to be. The book of the Old Testament cited more than almost any other to justify the marginalization, exclusion, and outright harm of queer people is now the name of a horror film in which the monster is conversion therapy itself. Writer-director Adrian Chiarella, making his feature debut, is telling you exactly what this film is about before a single frame rolls, and then he spends 88 minutes making the case that horror has always been the right genre for this particular reckoning. When justice and love start to feel transgressive they migrate to transgressive genres. Horror is the perfect vehicle for this moment in time.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

Sitting with this film in April 2026, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision clearing the way for conversion therapy practices to continue in states that sought to limit them, Leviticus stops feeling like metaphor and starts feeling like a living document. The horror here is not hypothetical. It is not historical. It is a ritual being performed right now, in rooms that don’t look like the ones in this movie but function exactly the same way.

Leviticus premiered at Sundance in January, was acquired by NEON in a seven-figure deal the same week, and arrives at Overlook as the festival’s centerpiece. If you know that the same producers behind Talk to Me are on this one, your expectations are already calibrated in the right direction. Now raise them a little more. This is the better film. I saw Talk to Me at The Overlook a few years ago and it blew my mind then. This film is better and way less bleak.

The setup is clean and devastating. Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are two teenage boys in an isolated, conservative Christian community in rural Victoria, Australia, quietly falling for each other in the way first love actually works, in glances and proximity and the specific electricity of being with someone who also wants to be with you. When their attraction is discovered by the local pastor, the community’s response is a “deliverance” ritual meant to cure them. The ritual goes catastrophically wrong for the boys but, cosmically right for the community that believes homosxuality should be prevented at all costs. The real impact releases a violent entity that appears to its victims in the form of the person they love thez most. The monster is desire itself, weaponized by shame. Twin Flames as the healer mentions.

What keeps this from collapsing into allegory is the relationship at its center. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen have the kind of chemistry that reads as genuine and almost painfully sweet, the kind that makes the horror mechanics land harder precisely because you’ve bought into what’s at stake. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins shoots them with a quiet intimacy that shifts registers seamlessly into dread. This is a quiet film. God, as one character says, is in that silence. The sound design understands this completely and is often quite content letting the audience squirm in that silence.

About those frogs. There are a lot of them in this film, and Chiarella is not using them casually. In Leviticus the book, frogs are among the plagues God unleashes, but there’s a Southern American folk idiom worth exploring here too: ‘you’re fattening frogs for snakes’. One of the first images of this film is a snake eating a frog. It’s what happens when you raise something vulnerable in a system designed to consume it. The queer kids in this film’s community aren’t just endangered, they’re being prepared. If they fight that preparation they die.

The second ritual sequence is brutal in a way that is difficult to shake, executed with one technical choice so specific and confident it deserves to be seen rather than described. Well-intentioned adults complicate things in this film in ways that feel accurate rather than convenient. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the industrial landscape Perkins keeps utlizing as a frame for each scene. I am from the midwest. This town feels eeriely familar to me. I recognize the toxicity dressed up as productivity, that sits underneath everything the film is saying about what communities do to the things they cannot categorize. The class desperation thrust upon a generation who are struggling with their own happiness. Hell I am old enough to remember when a politician made a comment about clinging to guns and religion and was excoriated for it. Obama would dig this film.

Levitivus is one of the scariest movies I have seen in a very long time and ends with a decidely upbeat and optimistic tone. It is not lost on me that there are likely queer elements of this film I am missing. I am a cis gendered straight white guy. That being said I do know how hard being a teenager is right now and how love makes a lot of that bareable. Sure our monsters may never leave us but maybe living an authentic life can keep them at bay for awhile.

Leviticus opens in the US on June 19. Mia Wasikowska, Ewen Leslie, and Nicholas Hope round out a cast that understands exactly what kind of film they’re in. This is a brilliant first work from a very confident director. Chiarella is one to watch.