𝔪𝔞𝔵

there were so many scenes where i was on the edge of my seat because i couldnt be sure whether or not it was the real ryan/naim or if it was the entity, and im sure this was done on purpose by the production team; to instil fear in their audience so we can feel how ryan and naim did.

for example, the scene against the screen door where naim and ryan hold hands through the mesh. i had the instinct to yell at the screen because… what the fuck is naim doing….thats not ur bf thats a monster!!! so on and so forth. but then i realized that naim had to have known the risks of being so physically close and vulnerable with ryan in that moment, unknowing if it’s really him or if it’s the entity. and despite his uncertainty, naim continued to lean in, to get as physically close as he can to ryan, knowing it could be the death of him.

it doesn’t come. days become weeks. at school, you were the shiny new toy long enough for the tiny year level of only twenty-six other kids to determine that you’re just as dull as everyone else in this town. you’re from a flyspeck nowhere just like here, but at least your nowhere had places you knew, faces you recognised, haunts you traced with bike tracks and footprints. your new pastor has a droning voice that is somehow impossible to let fade into background noise. your mum hangs desperately onto every word as if they’re spoken to her directly. you can’t remember the last time she looked at you like that.

there’s a boy at school called ryan. in class, he leans back in his chair until the front legs lift off the floor, balancing on two plastic points against ancient carpet. he throws ripped chunks of his rubber at his friends when they’re not looking. he never brings books or a pencil case to class, snickers in the back when the teachers are talking, mocks the girl with braces like all the other boys. when he smiles, you count his perfect white teeth. when he’s concentrating, he traces them with his tongue. you imagine how it might feel to replace his tongue with yours. it frightens you. at lunchtime, you sit on the edge of the oval alone watching fluffy clouds drift away, leaving you behind. ryan plays footy no matter the weather and ends most school days with dirt and grass stains on his uniform. in the change-rooms before phys ed, you watch him undress from the corner of your eye and pretend to be focused on tying up your shoes. all of him is golden, even the creamy skin of his stomach and thighs. you imagine how it would feel under your hands. it frightens you. sometimes you look up and find him already watching. and he doesn’t look away or pretend he wasn’t staring. your gazes lock and you can feel him peeling something away to look at a piece of you you’ve always worked to hide. it frightens you.

it happens almost by accident. your bike is next to his in the bike shed. you arrive at the same moment one afternoon. he sometimes has a milk crate lashed to the back for his schoolbag and the sight of it makes you smile. you can feel that searching gaze as you unlock your bike from the rack. he just looks at you, hands on the handlebars and both feet still firmly planted on the cement floor. come on, he eventually says, swinging a leg over the worn leather seat. i wanna show you something.

you ride behind him and watch sweat darken the back of his shirt under the empty blue sky. you imagine how it might taste and it frightens you. the bikes are abandoned beside a gumtree losing its bark and he leads you through yellow grass that gives his hair a golden cast. you’re watching him, entranced by the stiffness in his movement. that languid, cool confidence is replaced by a kind of mechanical swagger—a boy playing at casualness and failing terribly. you can’t imagine why he’s trying so hard to seem tough. you’re so hypnotised by his performance that you nearly step on the snake with the frog in its mouth. when you rear back, yelling in shock and fear, ryan’s delight is cruel and his high, mocking laughter makes you feel hot and bristly. he prods the snake with a stick. his jibes land, the jab about a fear of heights, the rolling eyes. they all sting and you try not to let it show.

the floor in the abandoned mill is soaked in sunlight. motes of dust spin in the air, kicked up by your feet and the bits of refuse you throw around the space together. you snap into stillness at his warning—funnel web, on your shoulder—and something ugly cracks inside you when it turns out to be another tease at your expense. you’re snarling fuck you, cunt before you can think and in another moment you’re both on that warm floor, twisting and wrestling and all you want is for him to cut to the fucking chase and tell you why you’re really here, and his body is hot on top of yours and his hands are tight around your wrists and that light-spun golden hair is falling in his eyes and he’s watching you glance at the place where he’s holding you down and your chest is tight and bursting and aching and his sudden kiss comes down so hard that you forget everything else that came before.

you wrench out of the kiss by instinct. his hands release your wrists. you’re panting now, staring up at him. he’s still. his face is open. you look at the softness of his parted lips and remember wanting to lick his perfect white teeth, wanting to taste his sweat, wanting to feel his body under your palms, and it puts a lightness in your belly that you’re convinced would have you floating away if not for his weight. you drag him down and try to kiss that lightness into his mouth.

after watching leviticus, i couldn’t help but put it in my top 4 — it has not left my mind since.

by the first watch, it’s a simple concept. a horror film, a monster haunting the main characters, they scream and cry a little bit, fight it off internally, the end. thanks for watching, now get up. but truly, there’s so much more to this movie that’s way more noticeable after a second, more focused watch. let’s break it down a little!

two souls intertwined

the most focused-on plot point, ryan’s and naim’s relationship. from the first minutes, we see their relationship being playfully/teasingly violent, which mostly comes out from ryan’s side, as that’s what his persona is built on. they’re rushing and pushing it. they don’t give eachother a second to thoroughly explore, feel and connect, they just straight up go into it. throughout the film, their relationship evolves from a ‘friends-with-benefits’ thing to an actual, pure love and intimacy.

it becomes more collected, gentle and you can actually feel the intense tension between the two of them rather than aggressive lust, if that’s how i can call it. naim in one way or another, as shown, introduces ryan to fragility and vulnerability.

also, what i’d like to point out cause i found it interesting! in the scene where naim’s mother has a monologue about her relationship with God; how she found God in a quote unquote, terrifying silence, how he guided her, listened to her and how she could connect with him. during that speech, ryan is shown on the frame from naim’s perspective. this somewhat clears up how naim feels about ryan— it was never sheer curiosity, a hookup, or a half-joke, it was genuine sense of safety and comfort. until, that comfort is shattered by;

shame disguised as horror

shame haunts. it runs after you, leaves a permanent cut that scars your brain and never heals. it’s a personal feeling that belittles and consumes you wholy, much like the entity. yet, the entity not only feeds out of fear; but also out of love and attraction. we can really see it when naim instead of blatantly fighting the entity, he chooses to trick it with affection— and it stops completely. he chooses to stop fighting his love, for a second, and the entity malfunctions. because love can defeat fear. it represents every ugly, flawed emotion that comes along with intense love and desire. it starts to lightly crush the relationship between ryanaim, as they both slowly start to be scared of eachother. who’s the real one? who’s the one i love, and the other one i’m scared of? or maybe they’re both?

another scene where queerness is represented as horror, and so as shame, is when naim goes to the police station to report hunter’s death and ryan being in danger. he gets questioned by one of the authorities; she starts going on about how, sometimes, when things get too bad mentally and turn hard to accept, they can create denial and delusions that we use to cope, run away from and replace that feeling.

after that, naim starts talking about his past relationship with eva and how it amplified his fear. kind of random to bring up a girl after talking about a monster that’s out to get teenage boys, no?

except, that whole conversation was a perfect metaphor for how internalized homophobia feels. you don’t want to accept being queer, because how can you, when the world demonizes it so greatly? and so, your only option is to ignore that, try to mend yourself into someone you’re not and replace queerness with “normalcy”. then you should be fine, but you’re not, because the truth still lives inside you. it can be ugly, saddening and painful, but it’s the raw truth.

a mother’s love

or more so, the lack of it.

naim’s mother, even purely at the start, is shown as ‘playfully’ mocking to naim and just feels shady. she’s also very, very religious and sees it as something wholly personal and absolute. as a parent, it’s clear that she loves her son. but that love is tangled up in her beliefs, own fears and the inability to accept naim fully. that, as hinted in the movie, can be a result of generational trauma that lightly gets put on naim. that disorted love led her to making bad decisions and labeling it as something that “had to be done”. she knew the consequences of sending naim into the healing, but she also pushed them aside and proceeded with it anyway.

hatred so deeply engraved in someone can make a crack on love and break it. she thought she was doing the right thing, but that wasn’t the case, not at all. i took it as a great showcase of how, despite the church & christianity being presented as something kind and saving, it’s destructive not only to a individual, but to a group; even with years of love and depth behind them.

but familiarity isn’t necessarily love. naim’s mother was neglectful, didn’t particularly care about what naim had to say and never believed him, nor did she care about his troubles and fears. “we need fear, naim.” is the most we got out of her after scarring her son and making him live with the entity for the rest of his life.

as her ‘beloved son’ comes to sleep next to her, awfully terrified because of his nightmares, she views it as him bothering her, left him completely alone and made him leave her room like it’s something to be ashamed of, needing your mother. complicated relationship with your own parent like that only fed on the shame, which played an enormous part in naim’s shame and insecurity.

i do wish their relationship was more developed, that’s for sure, but it still proved a clear point.

the light and rocks

what really caught my attention was the intention between the light and throwing rocks. if you watch the movie carefully, naim pre-‘healing’ in the scene where he …, has burning light behind him. that can be taken as a reminder that he’s just like ryan and hunter, or also can be taken as a foreshadow that he’s next in the process, and that’s inevitable.

at hunter’s working place, when naim hides, we can see the word “ice” several times. i stopped and thought; ice is the opposite of fire. fire is intense, all-consuming and suffocating. it’s also been used in the fights against entity.

which led me to a conclusion that not only it can hint at hunter having a totally different relationship with ryan than naim (which i will get to in a second), or how it can also symbolise his failure. he didn’t have the fire ‘in him’ to fight against the entity, he felt defeated. hopeless. he didn’t have anyone that he could live for, precisely, in a romantic connection. that’s what led to his death, somehow. a little bit :)

now, this one is a pretty obvious one, but the boys throwing rocks at eachother also holds a meaning. in the bible, getting stoned is continuously used as a form of punishment. as in leviticus 20:13 it also is stated that lying with another man as a man is a sin and should be punished with a bloody death, you can just collide these two together. amazing religious symbolism from the director, really

and on a quick note, the snake at the beginning is supposed to represent temptation as it’s also represented in the bible. ryan plays with it, not seeing the issue, while naim is scared and tells him to stop. a rather interesting way to show the contrast between naim’s and ryan’s beliefs.

naim vs. hunter

this segment is pretty clear in the movie. hunter and naim are completely separate personalities, different people with different approaches to life. hunter mirrors ryan’s tendency towards violence, throwing the rocks, aggressively making out with him; no raw connection between them, just a desperate attempt at love.

while naim grants ryan with tenderness, delicate touches, softness and passion. he gets a unsual (for him) outlook on love and how it should really feel, which deepens his feelings at their core.

the bus scene

the bus scene is a very talked about topic, but personally, not for the right reason. it’s not meant to be perceived as “hot”, it’s a perfect, short performance that lays out ryanaim’s acceptance for the audience beautifully.

couple of minutes before getting on to that bus, a girl tells them that being with eachother only deepens the entity and makes it worse for them both to bear. nonetheless, they push that thought aside and confidently express their love to eachother. harm doesn’t concern neither ryan nor naim, they both just crave eachother and that’s what matters most.

in addition to that, in a public transport. in a scenery that can ruin their lives and danger them. there’s not a moment when one says “what if someone sees us?”— no. it’s their moment, their shared time and devotion. their realization of one’s feelings (ryan realising naim likes him back and vice versa because the entity takes the form of a person you like most) not only intensifies the scene, but makes it much more wholesome and full of emotions. they’re giggling, smiling at each other,

they’re safe in eachothers arms without a care in the world.

it never stops, but it gets better

the ending is one of my favourite 5 minutes of the film lol. naim finally chooses to fight both for himself and for ryan. he doesn’t comply to his mother, he leaves and finds ryan exactly where he thought he would be.

“please tell me it’s really you” with teary eyes that meet naim’s, with a soft little smile. not only that, but after they get on the bus, naim still sees the entity. lurking at him, waiting. but even so, he doesn’t scream, he’s not scared. instead he looks at ryan, reminding himself that he’s there, with him, and so everything will be okay. he lays his head on ryan’s shoulder, and ryan allows him. he lets naim share burdens on both of them. despite everything; every trauma, every fight, every pain, every wail, they’re with eachother. and that’s what matters.