Care Has to Become the Threat
A Case Study of Leviticus (2026)
“The ritual doesn’t punish desire. It waits for it.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work.
This article discusses the film’s plot in detail, including its ending. It also discusses a curse used as a tool of religious coercion, a teenage death, and one scene of bullying and physical violence. Nothing graphic is described beyond what’s necessary for craft analysis.
A Note on Sourcing: Leviticus premiered at Sundance in January 2026 with an unusually active press trail for a first feature, including extended interviews with writer-director Adrian Chiarella conducted by Brian Davids for The Hollywood Reporter, Marshall Shaffer for Slant Magazine, and Jen Yamato for the Los Angeles Times. Production-history claims below are attributed to those interviews directly; the reading of the finished film is this publication’s own, built from direct viewing and cross-checked frame by frame against specific claims where the underlying mechanism—a match cut, a recurring motif, a POV choice—was central to the argument.
Late in Leviticus, Naim’s mother tells him the truth in four short sentences. It can’t be undone. That’s what they said. They told me it would keep you safe. She isn’t lying in any of them. That’s the whole problem.
Leviticus doesn’t have a villain. It has a pastor grieving a dead son, a healer who believes in his own ritual, a mother who is still, even now, not wrong to have been afraid—only wrong about what fear was for. Every adult in this film who endangers a teenage boy does it while trying to protect one. That isn’t a loophole in the story. It’s the story. The entity that stalks Naim and Ryan through the film’s back half doesn’t need hatred to work. It only needs someone, somewhere, deciding they understand what these boys need better than the boys do themselves, and calling the decision love.
They Told Her It Would Keep Him Safe
Chiarella has said plainly, in the run-up to the film’s release, that he’d initially considered a more direct approach—a queer riff on The Exorcist—before abandoning it because the premise kept reproducing the exact idea he wanted to dismantle: a demon living inside a gay kid, waiting to be cast out. What he built instead relocates the demon entirely. It isn’t inside Naim. It’s summoned by the people around him, and it’s built out of their fear, not his desire.
That relocation is why Arlene’s confession, when it finally arrives, isn’t staged as a villain’s reveal. She isn’t cornered into it. Naim asks what they told her, and she answers like someone finally allowed to put a weight down. The curse was never explained to her as a punishment. It was explained as protection—something that would keep her son safe from the world that had already taken so much from her. Her husband’s death sent her looking for certainty; she found it in a church that gave her a framework for surviving an unbearable year, and she has never really left it.
There’s an early, almost throwaway scene that tells you exactly how her faith actually works. An ice cream truck passes at an odd moment, and Arlene reads it as a small sign—evidence of something watching over them. Naim, skeptical, doesn’t want an ordinary coincidence turned into a miracle just because the miracle would be comforting. It’s a minor disagreement, easy to miss. But it quietly sets the terms for everything that follows: Arlene’s faith is built to recognize the divine when it confirms what she already wants to believe, and it goes conspicuously blind the moment something genuinely supernatural—something that would mean she’d made a catastrophic mistake—shows up in her own house.
When Naim tells her, earlier in the film, that something is hunting Ryan, she doesn’t accuse him of lying. She simply looks away and tells him she can’t help him—not cruelty, and not disbelief so much as the particular helplessness of someone who has already made a choice she can’t undo and doesn’t yet know how to name.
What she says next closes the gap between those two moments. We need fear, she tells him. It’s how we survive. That isn’t regret dressed up as philosophy. It’s the actual reasoning, offered without apology, from someone who still believes it. The film never gives her a redemption scene, and that’s a deliberate choice worth sitting with before moving on, because it’s going to matter again later.
The Ritual Makes Judgment Physical
The genre trick Leviticus pulls is turning that adult certainty into something with teeth. The ritual doesn’t cast anything out. It installs a rule: an entity that takes the shape of whoever a boy wants most, and attacks the instant that wanting becomes visible.
Chiarella has described an early draft that opened with the pastor delivering a sermon quoting Leviticus directly to the congregation—laying the community’s disapproval out in plain text before the story properly began. A filmmaker friend talked him out of it late in the edit, arguing that the audience already understands what this town thinks of these boys, and that spelling it out only slows the film down on its way to the actual horror. Chiarella cut it. The finished film never explains the town’s hostility in dialogue. It doesn’t have to. A congregation singing along to a worship band while two teenage boys exchange one uncomfortable glance across the aisle tells you everything the deleted sermon would have said, in about four seconds, without a word of exposition.
That same instinct governs how the film stages its violence. The entity doesn’t hunt the boys down. It waits at the threshold of a decision and crosses only after its victim does—and it’s willing to borrow the boys’ own courtship rituals to get there. Early in the film, Naim discovers Ryan and Hunter—the pastor’s own son—mid-fight, throwing rocks at each other in what plays like ordinary roughhousing until the distance between them closes and the fight becomes a kiss. There’s no entity in that scene. It’s simply how these two find their way to each other. Later, Naim visits Hunter at his after-school job, less out of guilt than out of a colder, more urgent question: whether whatever happened to Hunter means Ryan is next. Hunter doesn’t give him a clean answer. He describes something visiting him nightly, throwing things at him, and nobody believing a word of it—”why doesn’t anyone fucking believe me?”—before he’s called back to work. It plays like a dead end. It isn’t. Naim returns after closing and watches from outside as Hunter, alone, is attacked using the identical gesture: rocks thrown by something the camera never shows us, visible only as a blur crossing the frame, until Hunter—goaded into it, believing he’s still playing the same game—takes his shirt off and kisses the air in front of him. What follows isn’t hidden. Naim watches from a distance as Hunter is lifted off the ground and strangled in midair by something the frame never resolves into a shape—just silhouette, distance, and a body suspended above the concrete with nothing visibly holding it there. The following morning, the film presents his severed head alone in a field. No character discovers it for us. The entity hasn’t invented a new method of attack. It’s reenacting an intimate memory as an ambush, and the horror is entirely dependent on the audience already knowing what the gesture used to mean. Naim finds Ryan alone in a roller-rink photo booth in a related beat, working up to taking his shirt off in front of a camera that will only ever show Ryan; the assault starts the instant the shirt comes off. None of these are ambushes in the conventional sense. They’re punishments for a specific, expressed yes—staged, more than once, as a corruption of something the boys once did for each other freely.
That rule gets its clearest formal statement near the end, at a screen door. “Ryan” stands outside it, saying all the right things, and Naim—for a long moment—believes him. Chiarella has spoken about staging this particular beat as a deliberate callback to Jean Genet’s 1950 short Un Chant d’Amour, in which two imprisoned men reach for each other through a wall they can’t cross; a photo booth used for an earlier attack was chosen for the same reason, evoking the era when such booths were genuinely one of the only private spaces available to men who wanted to be close to each other unobserved. Both choices root the film’s violence in queer spatial history rather than invented mythology—these were real refuges, repurposed here as the exact places where refuge fails. At the screen door, the mesh was never the actual obstacle; a screen tears if you push on it hard enough, and the entity has already proven it doesn’t need a door at all. What it’s waiting for isn’t entry. It’s permission—and true to everything the film has already taught us about how these two actually communicate, Naim never says the word. He leans in and kisses him through the mesh instead. The mask drops the instant he does. The hand that held him tenderly a moment earlier tears through the mesh bloodied, grabs a fistful of his hair, and pulls. Naim tears himself loose rather than let it drag him closer, the escape costing him some of that hair rather than anything worse.
The Face Stops Proving the Person
None of that horror works, though, unless the film first destroys every ordinary way Naim has of knowing who he’s looking at—and it does this with unusual formal discipline.
Chiarella has cited John Carpenter’s The Thing as a direct influence on the identity confusion at the film’s center, and the debt shows in how relentlessly Leviticus trains its camera on glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces. The pastor’s daughter sits with the boys in one early scene, and the camera only shows their backs directly—their faces arrive secondhand, through a mirror set dead center in the frame, doing the work of a reverse angle without ever needing to cut to one. It’s a shot that gets its coverage for free out of blocking rather than editing, and it trains the audience, this early, to treat a reflection as a source of information the direct image is withholding. A kitchen window runs the same idea in reverse later on: it shows Naim only his own reflection until he kills the light, and what’s left once the reflection disappears is a figure in the dark yard who may or may not be waiting there. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins shoots much of the film on wide anamorphic lenses that swallow the boys into a landscape scored with power lines and refinery flares—two shapes, kept visually apart by hostile geography, long before the plot gives the separation a supernatural cause. By the time the entity is fully active, the film has already spent an hour teaching the audience to distrust the frame.
The most consequential formal decision, though, is one the audience never sees: what Chiarella chose not to shoot. An earlier draft of the script shifted perspective partway through, showing the entity appear as Naim from Ryan’s point of view. Chiarella cut it, on the record, because splitting the film’s perspective diluted its focus on Naim’s specific guilt over exposing Ryan and Hunter to the pastor in the first place—and because letting the audience see what Naim can’t see would have solved, for us, exactly the uncertainty the whole film depends on. That single unmade scene is one reason the movie’s horror remains so effective. We are never once allowed to know more than Naim knows. When Ryan finally walks toward him down an empty school hallway—not running, never running, simply present in a place the geography says he shouldn’t yet be able to reach—the horror isn’t in what we see. It’s that we’re exactly as unequipped to trust it as he is.
There’s a quieter irony sitting underneath all of this. Joe Bird, who plays Naim, became a recognizable face virtually overnight off the strength of Talk to Me; Chiarella has described sending him and co-star Stacy Clausen out into public as part of post-casting preparation, and at one point a stranger recognized Bird mid-exercise and he simply stayed in character rather than break it. Chiarella has said he drew directly on Bird’s own experience of sudden, unwanted recognition—strangers stopping him, his face turning up on other people’s T-shirts—to shape Naim’s arc. An actor whose face had recently stopped being fully his own is playing a character whose face is the one thing in the entire film that can no longer be trusted to prove anything.
Chiarella has described an early, almost private fixation that shaped how Perkins framed the whole film: parallel lines, two things traveling side by side that can never actually meet. It shows up literally, in the power lines the camera keeps finding excuses to linger on, and it shows up structurally, in how consistently the film keeps Naim and Ryan on opposite sides of something—a road, a fence, a pane of glass—long before the plot gives that separation a supernatural cause. The sound design works the same territory from a different angle. Chiarella has spoken about wanting the film to sound like real life rather than horror-movie horror, working with sound designer Emma Bortignon to keep the effects grounded and let Jed Kurzel’s score do the work of signaling when something has tipped from ordinary into wrong, rather than announcing it. Nothing in the film’s craft wants to tell you what you’re looking at or listening to. Everything wants you to have to check.
Fear Has to Change Owners
Chiarella has also named Tarkovsky’s Solaris as an influence on the film’s back half specifically—not for tone, but for a rule: the longer a character spends with the person the entity is imitating, the stronger and more convincing the imitation becomes, because it’s feeding on shared memory rather than surface mimicry. That rule is what makes Ryan’s most devastating line possible. Sitting with Naim after the ritual has already scarred them both, he offers something close to an argument: that the fear keeping them apart is exactly what the people who cursed them wanted. It’s a true thing to say, and it’s also precisely the kind of true thing the entity has, by that point in the story, learned to say. The line is stated once, and it can never be fully trusted again—not because it stops being true, but because truth has stopped being the test that matters.
Arlene’s line arrives from the opposite direction and lands with the same weight. We need fear. It’s how we survive. Ryan is describing fear as a weapon used against him. Arlene is describing fear as a tool she still believes protected her son. Both are right, inside their own logic, which is exactly why Naim can’t simply choose the correct one and be done with it. His deeper task was not only to figure out which version of Ryan was standing in front of him. It was to figure out which fear actually belonged to him, and which one he’d only ever borrowed from someone else’s certainty.
That distinction sharpens the film’s most misread beat. Cornered at the mill—the same building where their relationship first became physical, now on fire because Naim has set it that way to buy himself distance—”Ryan” appears behind a mesh grate with flame behind him, repeating the exact line about being made to fear each other. It plays, briefly, as persuasive—until it registers as reused material. The line worked the first time because it was new and true and devastating. It fails the second time because repetition itself has become the tell. Chiarella has spoken about working closely with intimacy coordinator Amy Cater on scenes that pivot directly from tenderness into violence, and on shaping what the entity’s face does specifically at the moment the performance ends—not a snarl, nothing theatrical, just a face that stops bothering to perform at all. That’s the tell in this scene too. Naim doesn’t outsmart it. He recognizes the loop, closes the shutter, and leaves it howling behind the fire. It’s worth being precise about what that does and doesn’t accomplish: the entity is trapped there, not destroyed. It’s the same figure, unmistakably, that Naim and Ryan pass on the roadside from the bus in the film’s final shot. Fire buys distance. It has never once bought safety.
The Cost of Care
The film’s discipline here has a real price, and it’s worth being honest about what it is rather than treating the absence of villains as a costless virtue.
Chiarella has said plainly that early drafts tried to give Arlene a more conventional redemption—some version of the scene where the parent finally sees what she’s done and asks forgiveness—and that every version of it felt false. He’s also pointed out, reasonably, that the film only covers a matter of weeks; a relationship damaged this badly doesn’t mend on that kind of timeline, and pretending otherwise would have been the more dishonest choice. He’s talked, too, about how different Arlene could have been on the page—he originally imagined something closer to a conventional horror-movie mother, in the vein of Piper Laurie’s Margaret White in Carrie, before Wasikowska’s performance pulled the character toward restraint instead. Refusing Arlene a conventional reckoning protects her from becoming a symbol standing in for a religious tradition rather than a specific, damaged person. But it also means she’s never asked to understand the damage as completely as Naim, or the audience, is forced to. She gains new information across the film’s final act. She doesn’t gain a different premise. The boys carry the entire cost of a decision she still, on some level, stands behind, and the film lets her keep standing behind it. That’s not a flaw exactly—it’s the more honest version of what happens when belief this deep gets disproven only partially, by a consequence its holder never fully has to witness. But it does mean the film’s accountability stays permanently lopsided, on purpose, and a viewer looking for the moment someone is made to answer for what happened to these boys is never going to find it.
Recognition Has to Become Choice
For most of Leviticus, Naim’s growth is really pattern recognition dressed up as maturity. He gets better at reading rooms, better at spotting the geography that doesn’t add up, better at guessing which threshold is about to matter. None of that is agency. Frightened, his instinct is still to move his blanket onto his mother’s floor and sleep near the only authority he’s ever trusted, even after that authority has already begun to fail him.
The one moment that actually belongs to him arrives only after her confession—after we need fear, it’s how we survive settles into something he can’t unhear. He doesn’t argue with her. He leaves. It’s the first decision in the entire film that isn’t inherited from someone else’s certainty, isn’t fear borrowed from an institution, isn’t even correct in any way the film bothers to prove. He simply decides, on his own authority, what the rest of his life is going to be built around.
He finds Ryan at a bus station. Please tell me it’s you, Ryan says, and there’s no proof left to offer—the film has spent two hours dismantling every ordinary way one person confirms another. Naim answers with a smile instead of an argument, because an argument was never going to be the thing that convinced either of them. They ride out of town sharing a pair of headphones, the same posture the film opened on, before either of them knew what the word curse would come to mean. The camera holds on them a moment longer than it needs to, then pans past the window to the roadside, where a figure in a familiar tank top stands watching, perfectly still, waiting on nothing in particular—not gone, not defeated, simply present, the way it’s been present at every threshold since the ritual first took hold.
Causeway Films reportedly came aboard this project specifically because they wanted Chiarella to have a real production schedule for directing teenage actors properly, rather than rushing them through on the microbudget the script had originally been developed under. It’s a small, unglamorous fact, and it isn’t part of the story Leviticus tells on screen. But it sits there anyway, quietly answering the question the film spends its whole runtime refusing to answer for its characters: what actual care, as opposed to the certainty that gets called care, looks like when it’s paying attention to what a person in front of you actually needs.
Leviticus never tells you the entity is defeated, because it was never a monster that could be defeated in the first place. It was always just someone else’s certainty, given a shape and a set of teeth. The boys don’t win. They just decide, finally, which fear gets to keep deciding for them.