Leviticus (2026): Neon's Sundance Midnight Queer-Horror Breakout, Explained

Leviticus hits US theaters Friday, June 19, 2026, with Neon distributing. Australia gets it the day before, on Thursday June 18, through Maslow Entertainment. The film comes out of Causeway Films and Salmira Productions, with funding from Screen Australia and VicScreen. Runtime is 88 minutes — short for a Sundance Midnight premiere, which usually trends 100 to 110.

Neon paying seven figures at Sundance for an Australian debut is a meaningful signal. Their horror picks have a hit rate most distributors envy.

Longlegs cleared $127M worldwide on a small budget. Saint Maud, Possessor, and The Lodge all got the kind of marketing push small films rarely see. Neon doesn't tend to buy films they aren't planning to work for, and a first-time director from another continent clearing that bar at Sundance is the kind of acquisition horror people should be paying attention to.

The release slot is friendly. Nothing of comparable weight opens June 19, and the Australian rollout the day before lets a small wave of international word-of-mouth filter into US opening night.

The Midnight section at Sundance is a specific kind of selection. It exists for horror and genre — films programmers expect to get a strong reaction at a midnight screening with a packed house. Recent breakouts include Talk to Me (2023) and Late Night with the Devil (2023). Earlier years gave us Hereditary, The Babadook, and Mandy. The track record is hard to argue with.

Programming a Midnight slot is a bet that a film will work in two specific conditions at once — a wired audience that came to be scared, and a press corps that came to write about whatever wins the room. Both rarely happen at the same time. The films that land both usually leave Park City with a deal and end up in theaters by summer. Leviticus did the first part and is now doing the second.

The setup is straightforward. Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are teenagers in a devout rural Australian town who fall in love. Their families and church don't approve.

The response — what looks at first like a prayer ritual aimed at fixing them — turns out to be a summoning. Something gets loose. It hunts both boys, and it does so in the form of the person each of them desires most. That person is each other.

A conversion-therapy horror that literalizes the mechanism this directly is rare. The thing the institution claims it's doing to save you takes a shape that wants to eat you. The metaphor isn't scaffolding around the plot. It IS the plot.

Most films with this kind of one-to-one allegory either preach to the choir or bury the point under so much surface that nobody outside the genre community notices. The early reads from Sundance suggest Chiarella found the middle path.

The comparison every coverage piece reaches for is It Follows (2014), and it's the right one. Both films build their horror around an entity that takes the form of someone the protagonist knows. Both depend on patience as a horror device. Both use their central mechanic as a way to talk about something specific — sexual transmission in It Follows, religious authority and queer desire in Leviticus.

Where they part ways is direction. It Follows is a film about avoidance: keep moving, pass it on, never stop. Leviticus is a film about being targeted by the people who are supposed to love you.

The mechanic looks similar but the emotional weather is the opposite. It Follows is anxious and propulsive. Early word on Leviticus is closer to grief — Sundance reactions reach for words like "devastating" and "tender," which It Follows almost never got.

If you bounced off It Follows because the mechanic felt thin once you understood it, the early read on Leviticus is that it sustains. If you loved It Follows for the way the mechanic structured the dread, you're going to find Leviticus working in a familiar key.

This is Chiarella's first feature. There's no prior feature work to anchor expectations against, which is normal for a Sundance Midnight debut — the festival has been the entry point for first-time horror directors for years (Ari Aster with Hereditary, Robert Eggers with The Witch, Danny and Michael Philippou with Talk to Me).

The score is from Jed Kurzel, whose track record — The Babadook, Macbeth, Animal Kingdom — is exactly the kind of brooding austerity the film looks like it needs. That's a decorated below-the-line credit for a first feature, and probably part of why early reactions emphasize how composed the film looks.

Mia Wasikowska being attached as both an actor and an executive producer is worth noting. Australian horror over the last decade — The Babadook, You Won't Be Alone, Talk to Me — has been carried in large part by established names who actively choose to work on it rather than treat it as a stepping-stone. Wasikowska signing on at the level she did is a signal that Leviticus is being read inside the industry as part of that lineage.