After its acclaimed world premiere in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival and a successful run at MoMA’s New Directors/New Films showcase in New York, Australian supernatural horror sensation Leviticus has officially opened in limited US theaters. Scoring a killer 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is being released by NEON and is one of the year’s most critically acclaimed and truly scary genre offerings of 2026.
The feature directorial debut from Adrian Chiarella, brought to life by the powerhouse production teams behind The Babadook and Talk to Me, delivers a relentless mix of psychological trauma, queer coming-of-age romance, and raw, visceral scares.
Monster of Lust
Leviticus is set in a deeply conservative, provincial Australian community and features two teenage boys, Niam (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen). What starts as typical hyper-masculine horsing around in an abandoned mill soon turns into a long-buried, intense romantic attraction between the two.
Their awakening is violently interrupted when their religious community forces Ryan into a traumatic, forced exorcism to “cure” him of his desires. This act of cruelty unwittingly summons a relentless, violent supernatural entity. The monster’s psychological cruelty stems from its shapeshifting nature: it hunts the local queer youth by taking on the physical form of the exact person they most desire, forcing them to run from the living images of each other.
A Clever and Controversial Marketing Campaign
NEON’s unorthodox marketing campaign, which eschewed all the usual horror tropes, generated a huge online buzz ahead of its mid-June release. Rather than filling feeds with generic images of blood, dark shadows, or disfigured monsters, the official poster rollout was a series of very intimate, raw, and physically charged close-ups of Bird and Clausen.
The promo images include text fragments that combine to create a haunting tagline: “I was never scared of this.” The campaign echoes the film’s core theme by showcasing the raw vulnerability of teenage intimacy as the real focus of the film: in a world dominated by prejudice, loving someone becomes the ultimate vulnerability and source of supernatural terror.
What Critics and Audiences Are Saying
The movie is already attracting strong structural comparisons to the work of modern horror masters such as Jennifer Kent. Beyond its terrifying set-pieces and oppressive widescreen cinematography, Leviticus is being highly praised by critics for its incredible emotional depth and its nuanced performances, particularly a calibrated, complex supporting turn by Mia Wasikowska (who also executive produces).
The Verdict: Audiences walking into the theater will find an atmospheric and swift 88-minute nightmare that employs the slasher genre as a potent metaphor for systemic trauma. It’s a powerful, emotionally heavy, and deeply scary piece of modern filmmaking that proves that the best horror films are those grounded by real human stakes.
