Panic Fest: Leviticus is It Follows with a conversion therapy twist

Courtesy Panic Fest / NEON

Panic Fest 2026 just wrapped up at Screenland Armour in KC. The yearly homegrown genre festival is a delightful cavalcade of feature films hitting theaters soon, and some with releases further down the road. Read all of our coverage of these debuts.

Fans of David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 horror classic It Follows, get ready for Leviticus, its Australian LGBTQ+ spiritual sibling. Adrian Chiarella’s buzzy first feature reimagines Mitchell’s meditation on intimacy and death through a lens of conversion therapy. Some of the movie’s ideas—particularly its treatment of evangelicalism—are disappointingly undercooked, but its promise and the performances of its two young stars are undeniable.

Naim (Joe Bird) and his mom (Mia Wasikowska) are new arrivals in a small town. Naim is immediately drawn to Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome, charismatic kid from church. Ryan seems to be into him, too, until Naim catches Ryan making out with Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), the preacher’s son. The heartbroken Naim rats both boys out to Hunter’s dad, who hires a “deliverance preacher” (Ozsploitation veteran Nicholas Hope) to “fix” their homosexual urges.

As one might expect from a religious ceremony conducted by Bad Boy Bubby himself, the conversion therapy exercised on Ryan, Hunter, and later Naim has horrific consequences. It’s an entity that imitates the person you love, and it’ll kill you if you let it close enough.

As Naim and Ryan get closer, the risks get higher. Their feelings are intense, but is love worth it if you can never know for sure that you might die when you see your partner on the street, in a hallway, or even in bed?

Much like It Follows was visually rooted in a sense of time and place, Leviticus makes great use of the spare, dusty landscapes and crumbling buildings of its setting. Naim and Ryan explore abandoned warehouses and ride their bikes through barren fields. Their church is built out of concrete and cinder blocks, all of it communicating a bleak future unless they can make it out. Like Mitchell, Chiarella ensures those settings serve a practical purpose, in addition to setting the tone.

As Naim and Ryan, Bird and Clausen are incredible, with Bird expressing sensitivity and wide-eyed vulnerability in contrast to Clausen’s Hemsworth-esque strength and vivacity. As the pair figure out what to do about the entity haunting them, those traits shift, with Naim growing more determined to shake the thing, and Ryan’s confidence shaken to its core. Bird and Clausen play that beautifully, making their characters’ connection sweeter and stronger as their need for each other grows alongside their fear.

The weakness in Leviticus lies in its fealty to its concept at the expense of other characters.

The movie’s treatment of religion, for example, is as flat as you’ll get in any other movie about conversion therapy. That’s understandable—the practice and beliefs supporting it are close-minded, dangerous, and wrong. Here, though, it eliminates any opportunity for actual conversation between characters like Naim and his mom, who seem to have an understanding relationship until she sends him for treatment.

Wasikowska’s character states reasons for sending her son to the dreaded deliverance preacher—whose frightening methods she’s witnessed, and the results of which should seem suspect to anyone with working eyeballs—which contradict what we know about her (admittedly, what we do know isn’t enough). Given the few interactions we do see between her and Naim, her decision seems like an excuse for the movie to get Naim where he needs to be rather than one that feels consistent with her character.

Leviticus remains an impressive first film, even if it does borrow considerably from one of the most effective horror movies in recent memory.

It gives us a central relationship worth rooting for, with leads who make us feel the emotional and physical stakes, which are the most important elements to get right. The rest needs more nuance (and yes, a little more originality) to reach the heights it’s aiming for, but getting 80% of the way there on your debut is impressive enough that Leviticus deserves attention.