'Leviticus' Wants to Critique Gay Oppression. Its Images Tell a Different Story.

I watched Leviticus as a Thai LGBTQIA+ person (gay), born, raised, and still living in Thailand. For me, being gay is not an abstract idea, not a social issue observed from the outside, and not a convenient identity for a film to use as raw material. It is a life.

That does not mean I expect every gay character to be good, noble, flawless, or sanitized. Gay characters can be selfish, impulsive, aggressive, sexual, confused, reckless, and wrong, because gay people are human beings.

The problem with Leviticus is not simply that it gives us flawed gay characters. The problem is that the film repeatedly frames gayness through aggression, risk, a loss of self-control, and the surrender of reason to sexual desire.

For me, this is not merely a negative representation of same-sex attraction. It risks reinscribing the very prejudice the film seems to be trying to critique.

On a technical level, I do not have much to argue with. The cinematography, editing, sound design, music, performances, and atmosphere are all professional. The film knows how to use silence, space, and sound to create unease, and the lead actors carry several scenes with real commitment.

But I want to move past those compliments quickly, because this review is not about whether Leviticus is competently made. It is about what the film communicates, and what that communication does.

Leviticus is the feature directorial debut of Adrian Chiarella, who wrote and directed the film. It follows Naim and Ryan, two teenage boys in a rural Australian community shaped by religious belief. After their relationship is exposed, a ritual meant to remove same-sex desire unleashes a supernatural force that appears in the form of the person its victim desires most.

As a premise, this is not new. Western cinema has long returned to the collision between gayness, religion, conservative family structures, conversion therapy, and communities that treat same-sex desire as sin.

There is nothing wrong with telling an old story again. But a film still has to bring a new understanding, a new dimension, or at least a deeper way of seeing the problem.

Leviticus does not do that.

It places a religious mother, a closed community, a preacher, a ritual, guilt, forbidden desire, and supernatural danger next to one another, but it rarely makes those elements meaningfully cohere.

We know that Naim's mother sees his gayness as a problem. But the film does not spend enough time helping us understand the world that shaped her. Why does the church have more power over her than the safety of her own child? Why, when her son clearly says that something terrible happened after the ritual, does she still treat his sexuality as the main problem?

The film may want to suggest that extreme belief can make parents refuse to listen to their children. But calling a character "religious" is not enough to replace motivation, psychology, and an inner life.

As a result, Naim's mother does not appear as a complex human being trapped inside a system of belief. She often feels like a device placed there to push the story toward ritual and danger.

What frustrates me most is that the time the film could have spent building the family, the community, and the power of religion is instead spent on Naim and Ryan's relationship. Yet that relationship never truly made me understand why these two boys love each other, or why they are so bound to one another.

The film introduces their attraction through thrown objects, provocation, rough play, gestures that look like they may become violence, and then kissing or sexual behavior.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a relationship beginning through teasing or physical play. Some couples do have that dynamic. But when the film barely gives us other forms of intimacy to balance it out, we see very little of how these boys talk to each other, how they understand each other, how they feel safe with each other, or what they see in each other beyond physical attraction.

What the film calls love is therefore expressed mainly through aggression, risk, and sexual impulse.

When this happens again and again, it no longer feels like the specific personality of two characters. It becomes the central grammar through which the film communicates gay intimacy.

The scene that made me almost want to walk out of the theater takes place on a bus.

By this point, the characters have already encountered several strange and dangerous events. They should have enough information to be cautious, to protect themselves, and to avoid situations that might allow the danger to return.

But when the two boys are alone together, they kiss and become sexual with each other on the bus.

The problem is not that gay people have sex or experience sexual desire. Sexual desire is part of being human, and gay characters should not have to be desexualized in order to be accepted.

The problem is the context the film chooses.

The characters know they are in danger. They know desire, and the image of the person they love, may be used as a tool to harm them. They know that being seen in their surrounding community could lead to serious consequences. And yet the film still has them act this way without giving that decision enough psychological weight.

The image that results is not simply "two teenagers experiencing desire." It suggests, implicitly, that gay desire is so overpowering it can defeat reason, fear, and the instinct to protect oneself.

That touches an old stereotype: gay men as hypersexual, unable to control themselves, and prone to sexual behavior in public spaces.

A film that wants to fight prejudice should not use that prejudice so carelessly as a narrative engine.

Another scene takes place when Naim is home alone and something that looks like Ryan appears at his door.

At this point, Naim already knows that the figure appearing as Ryan may not actually be Ryan, and may be something that wants to hurt him. Any person repeatedly facing the same kind of danger should try to verify who is there, keep distance, avoid interaction, or at least show a stronger hesitation.

But after a brief attempt at persuasion, Naim is pulled into a rhythm that once again feels as if it is moving toward a kiss.

The scene severely diminishes his ability to think and make decisions. It makes Naim look so vulnerable to sexual or romantic attraction that he cannot use what he has already experienced to protect himself.

And when this kind of scene repeats, the film is not only creating a careless character. It is creating a meaning: gay people are weak, uncontrolled, and ready to walk toward danger when triggered by desire.

Gay people are not more emotionally fragile than everyone else. We do not have more sexual desire than everyone else. We do not have less ability to control ourselves than other human beings.

Gay people are people. We have reason, fear, survival instincts, and different kinds of complexity from one person to another.

In interviews and press materials, Leviticus has been positioned as queer horror about conversion therapy, homophobia, and desire made monstrous. The film is clearly engaging with horror, repression, queer love, and the wounds created when society teaches people to fear their own desire.

This is why I do not want to accuse the director of hating gay people, or of making a film with the intention to harm same-sex attracted people. I do not have evidence for that accusation, and the context around the film points in the opposite direction.

An artist can intend to oppose prejudice and still create a work that reproduces it. An artist can intend to present gay desire honestly, but if that desire is consistently tied to irrationality, aggression, and destruction, the effect is not the same as the intention.

Leviticus may believe it is saying, "Society makes gay people feel as if love is a curse."

But what the film repeatedly shows feels closer to, "Gay desire makes people stupid and leads them into danger."

Those are not the same thing.

The title Leviticus refers to the third book of the Bible, a text whose verses have often been used to condemn relationships between men.

The title makes it clear that the film wants to confront religion as a tool used to oppress same-sex desire.

But once we enter the film itself, the meaning becomes less clear than it should be.

The prayers and rituals in the story appear to draw from Christianity. They are not clearly framed as an invented cult language or a completely fictional ritual system. After the ritual, supernatural danger emerges, which raises an important question: where does the evil come from?

Does it come directly from Christianity?

Does it come from a distortion of religion used to control others?

Does it come from the person performing the ritual?

Does it come from the hatred of the family and community?

Or does it come from the belief that gayness is something wrong that must be removed?

Each answer carries a very different moral and political meaning. If the film wants to critique the use of religion to oppress people, it should help us see the difference between faith, interpretation, and power exercised through faith.

Instead, the film does not create enough clarity in any direction.

Not explaining everything is not a problem by itself. Horror does not need to lay out every rule or origin of the supernatural. But meaningful ambiguity gives the audience space to interpret while still providing enough internal evidence and conceptual structure to support that interpretation.

What Leviticus does feels closer to withholding information than creating meaningful ambiguity.

The film wants us to be afraid, but it does not make us understand what we are afraid of.

Strange events happen to create shock. The supernatural appears to push the story forward. Characters make bad decisions so horror scenes can continue. But these elements do not come together as a clear idea.

Some reviews have praised Leviticus as a creative combination of queer love and horror, reading the supernatural as a metaphor for repression, self-hatred, and the trauma of conversion therapy.

I understand that reading. The film's premise certainly opens the door to it.

But for me, the film does not develop those ideas with enough depth. Having symbols does not automatically mean a film has dimension. Having the supernatural does not automatically make every ambiguity profound.

We do not understand the mother more deeply. We do not understand the community more deeply. We do not understand religion in the world of the film more deeply. And we do not truly understand the lives of these two boys more deeply.

When the film ended, I did not leave with a new understanding of religious oppression, a new dimension of love between men, or a feeling that the film had seriously challenged old prejudice.

I only saw fear, violence, and gay desire being linked again and again.

Same-sex relationships are not fundamentally different from other human relationships.

People fall in love because they feel attachment, safety, understanding, attraction, or because they see something in another person. A relationship can be tender, messy, toxic, beautiful, contradictory, or full of conflict, just like relationships between people of any gender.

Gay relationships do not need to be purified or turned into model behavior. But they should not have to be made strange all the time just because a film wants intensity.

In Leviticus, the boys' love is almost never allowed to be ordinary or dignified in itself. It has to be expressed through rough play, fighting, risk, and sexual behavior.

Instead of showing two ordinary human beings whose love is made dangerous by the society around them, the film arranges their behavior in ways that make the relationship itself look dangerous and abnormal.

That is the contradiction: the film wants to blame society for turning gay desire into a monster, but its own visual language helps make that desire look monstrous.

I give Leviticus 1.5/5.

That score does not mean the film has no technical skill. The craft is strong, the actors do their work well, and the premise could have developed into something powerful.

But what matters more is what the film chooses to do with that premise.

The early section is not tight enough. It spends too long on a relationship that does not make us understand the characters, while neglecting the mother, the community, and the religious power structure around them. The supernatural is used to create fear, but it does not lead to understanding or a clear idea.

Worst of all, the film places gay characters inside a pattern of aggression, risk, and sexual desire that diminishes their ability to think and protect themselves.

I did not leave the theater with a new understanding of gayness, religion, love, or oppression. I did not receive a new dimension from a subject that has already been told many times. I did not even receive enough entertainment to compensate for those failures.

What stayed with me was an image of gay people as weak, irrational, and more sexually driven than other human beings.

Whether or not the filmmaker intended that, this is what the film communicated to me as one gay viewer.

And it is not a message that should have been sent.