Why the Conversion Therapy Horror Movie Is a Love Story

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Leviticus” and “Obsession,” both currently playing in theaters.

Deep into the new horror movie “Leviticus,” there’s an interlude that’s stunning for how simple it is. Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), two teenage boys, have faced down struggles both prosaic and metaphysical. And now, they’re effectively alone together, seated in the backseat of a largely empty commuter bus. Freed, for the length of the bus ride, from everything outside it, the boys start to kiss, then to fumble, gently — even tenderly.

This deserves emphasis because it’s the first moment in queer director Adrian Chiarella’s “Leviticus” that the boys have had a moment to enjoy each other’s company. In their first encounter, a trip to an abandoned mill undertaken after masculine Ryan seems to sense that he and sweetly shy new-boy-in-town Naim might share a secret inclination, their tentative grapplings occur on the narrow boundary between intimacy and violence. Subsequently, both boys, being raised in rural Australia as members of a restrictive church, are brought before a “deliverance healer,” an exorcist figure who curses each to be stalked by an apparition of that which they most desire — Naim must dodge a version of Ryan, and vice versa.

It’s conversion therapy via aversion therapy: If Naim and Ryan can never figure out whether their lover is real or a spectral figure sent to kill them, they’ll probably stay apart. But, as anyone who spent some portion of their teen years in a pew might understand, the church has not accounted for the power of the adolescent libido. Naim and Ryan are together on their bus trip after trying to uncover more information about the demon persecuting them; it’s no one’s idea of a joyride. But it allows them a stolen moment. 

“Leviticus,” picked up by Neon after a Sundance debut earlier this year, is poised to be another data point in a summer of horror breakouts by first-time directors. “Obsession” and “Backrooms” have already scrambled expectations for what’s possible for grabby, youth-oriented horror with at least a little more than scares on the mind. But, seeing “Leviticus” the same day as “Obsession,” I was amused at just how little the films — both festival-anointed, indie-studio-backed relationship dramas by first-time filmmakers — shared thematically. That’s no knock on either film: “Obsession” is a very effective but pitch-dark look at the dynamics of straight couples, using the tools of genre to diagnose protagonist Bear (Michael Johnston) as, ultimately, a coward and abuser. The evil stalking him, a girlfriend who adores him so much that she will ruin his life, is one that he summoned (destroying the psyche of an innocent bystander in the process) out of an indolent desire to be loved without behaving lovably. And he deals with it by not dealing with it, until he kills himself. The end!

I found this approach bracing and heartily satisfying, but I appreciated, by contrast, the gentler touch with character in “Leviticus,” in part because the struggles of gay teens seeking love differ from those of incel-adjacent twentysomething straight men. Here, Naim and Ryan have no particular trouble finding a youthful version of love. But, as their seeming to attempt to beat one another up before falling into an embrace attests from the film’s first scene, keeping it requires overcoming an ingrained shame that’s terrifying, even before the feeling becomes embodied and bloodthirsty. (In this, the show shares a sensitivity with “Heated Rivalry,” a show that captured hearts by depicting the emotional terrain of the closet, and the inner lives of characters who have very good reason to want to stay there. I’d also recommend that curious viewers check out the Australian TV drama “Invisible Boys,” about the toll the closet takes on young men in a “Leviticus”-like setting.) The demon appears as if it wants to caress both boys up until it starts choking them, and part of what scares Naim and Ryan is that the two types of contact had already gotten hopelessly confounded by cascading spirals of self-doubt. That self-doubt will feel familiar, painfully so, for any viewer who grew up stalked by the demon of desiring in a different way.

And the specific shame running through “Leviticus” is rooted in the fact that the emotions governing Naim and Ryan are treated as, whether fixable or not, simply wrong. One of the film’s sharpest ideas is that Naim’s mother, played by Mia Wasikowska (who is, startlingly for those who revere her early work, legitimately old enough to play the mom of a teen), isn’t a monster; she loves and wants her version of what is best for him, and they share a rapport based on years of history. The decisions she makes — including, we learn deep into the film, forcing the unorthodox therapy on Naim despite knowing its potentially lethal implications — are monstrous. But then, she’s provided Naim with a lifelong education that no place is safe: Not home, and not the privacy of his own thoughts or heart.

Ryan’s learned similar lessons, and, for a time, runs from the real Naim, seeing in him the creature who shares Naim’s face but not his soul. But, in the film’s endgame — after Naim, using the exorcist’s tool of fire against the demon, traps him inside the mill where the boys first tussled — Ryan and Naim see one another, and each recognizes, somehow, that the other is real, and that their liberation from this curse could be the start of finding freedom from all else that’s binding them. We see them on a bus once more, simply lounging and sharing a pair of headphones. It’s not sex — it doesn’t need to be, as they have all the time they need ahead of them. But it’s a stolen moment all the same, a chance to breathe after all that they’ve endured, and the optimistic ending of what may be summer’s most surprising love story.