Critic Reviews

This outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curdling fright with incisive social commentary.

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.

Chiarella has a skill for creating scares beyond the obvious, but Leviticus (which takes its name from the biblical verse often used against homosexuality) gains a massive jolt from a near-perfect melding of theme and concept.

Chiarella’s pro-queer filmmaking extends to his ability to perfectly capture the fumbling ecstasy of new love, the fierce longing of stolen kisses and how scary it is to submit to a new partner. Kudos to Bird and Clausen for capturing that universal feeling.

Leviticus is the most haunting love story to hit theaters in a long while. It’s also an effective horror movie, which makes writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s successful balancing act all the more impressive.

There is something stubbornly singular about director Adrian Chiarella’s film that resists easy comparisons to the likes of Obsession and Backrooms.

A confident and unnerving allegorical gem.

Leviticus is not a perfect horror film . . . But the film’s moody atmosphere — including a soundtrack full of clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting ride.

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.