Leviticus

Many thoughts on this. It almost feels like a film primed for my enjoyment. Not something I will write about here (as we would be here a while), but the intersectionality between Christianity and queerness is a subject I have thought far too much about. It's something that ripples through my life still, and this film, and oddly the event I went to surrounding this film, really provoked thoughts about my relationship to the way I was brought up and my queerness.

So going into this film and it setting up the pieces of, the "good intentions" of Christian folks, the internalised homophobia of queer youth, the magic and rarity of finding queer love at a young age in spite of the repression that is self-imposed, and the horrors that are enacted by people in the name of love, I was so excited to see where it takes those ideas... and it just doesn't.

It lays out all these pieces, and takes its time doing so, which I appreciated, but then the film is over in the blink of an eye. The film sort of just ends; there's no real effort in exploring these ideas in any depth. It's a real shame when dealing with subject matter so complicated, but I almost think the ideas that this film conjures up are more interesting than what is actually explored in the film.

Perhaps it’s because it presents itself as this elevated horror that I was hoping for more, and more and more lately I find that horrors attach themselves to these larger, grander ideas in the hopes of being profound and meaningful but rarely go further than simply using it as a basis for the horror.

We are constantly retreated back to the same ideas, the same scares, the same level of depth. The film doesn't seek to expand its view past what was set up; once you know the pieces, they don't really move.

I sound overly negative about the film, and it's simply out of sheer frustration as I was really hoping this pushed itself a bit more. Dare I say this film would've functioned better not as a horror because what I was blown away by was the romance and the tenderness displayed. Hey, maybe the real horror is just the homophobia of living in this town and the defiant act of loving despite that is enough.

It's so rare to get young queer relationships like this on screen and credit to both actors for fully making you believe in the love they share. The physicality of their performances, both in the tenderness and also the more vitriolic elements, is breathtaking and given how short the film is, it's a miracle the ending hits as much as it does (even if it is very on the nose, my media literacy skills are looking at you, shared headphones).

The horror angle that this film took cheapened the love on screen, both in its quite poor scares and just how flat the film looked. In saying all of this those, big fan of getting more queer films, and queer genre films as well, and I was really moved by the film - but more so by the ideas it brought up than the actual exploration of those ideas