Leviticus

Leviticus announces Adrian Chiarella as a filmmaker of remarkable confidence and control. It's a horror film that trusts its audience, trusts its characters, and trusts the power of what remains unseen. In doing so, it becomes one of the year's most unsettling — and impressive — genre debuts.

At its heart, the film is a love story. A love story about two souls who need to trust each other if they want to survive.

A confident and unnerving allegorical gem.

The writing is original, rich, and effective, ramping up tension until it reaches a graphic, brutal crescendo in the third act.

Chiarella’s film is small in scope but shattering in emotional range, slowly burrowing under your skin. Once it makes its home there, there is no shaking free of its haunting, heartbreaking and surprisingly harmonious vision.

We know from innumerable slashers that when a character is alone, trouble is around the corner. But “Leviticus,” with its gloomy, isolated setting and dogmatic parents, manages to turn this vulnerability into an existential issue, too. To make matters worse, the only glimmers of human warmth our boys receive are from each other — and that opens yet another can of worms.

Bird and Clausen’s performances bring an elevated energy to the premise, and their chemistry causes the overall film to come across as more romantic than horrific.