Ok so I’ve watched Leviticus yesterday for the first time and idk if this makes any sense but I thought a lot about the ending, about how during the last scene when we see ryan and naim on the bus we see entity ryan standing outside. Naim looks at the entity and then at real ryan and then leans on him, closing his eyes, looking at peace, like he is quietly accepting whatever comes next. And it got me thinking, what does come next? Because I refuse to believe that they are doomed to live their lives in misery and fear now, I know that what has been done cannot be undone but I also believe that it can be made less severe, less horrible over time.
I love the idea of the entities in leviticus slowly looking more and more like an outdated version of ryan and naim, like their scared teenage selves they left behind that don’t resemble their adult selves. Like the more they live a happy life, the more they love and support one another, the harder it gets for the entity to be able to emulate them as they currently are. That’s how I feel when I look at pictures of myself in high school, my eyes look so sad and lonely, I was so desperate for friends, for confirmation that I wasn’t unloveable. My eyes look completely different now in pictures, I have a queer circle of friends, I look happy. I think that would be a natural and logical progression of how the entities slowly lose power. I believe the reason jessica lived such a miserable life after her girlfriend died is because she is alone, because she is isolated and doesn’t have anyone she can lean on, because she is absolutely consumed by fear and horror. The entity targets you when you’re alone because in isolation, without support you’re the most vulnerable, the most desperate for contact, the most likely to want to believe the entity is real even if logic dictates otherwise. So, my conclusion is, living in isolation without allowing yourself to love freely actually makes the entity more powerful, whereas having someone by your side, learning to love yourself, your queerness, finding your footing in the world and community with other queer people makes it much less likely to be able to trick you and harm you.
At some point naim will look outside his window in the morning and see entity ryan trying to get him to come outside, but it’s like a faded photograph of his boyfriend, a sad, lonely version of ryan that never found love, never got to live to adulthood, stuck in the state he was sentenced in to live in misery or else to die young by adults in his life who should’ve known better and cared for him instead. And naim’s heart aches for that mirage outside, but he knows that’s not his ryan, he knows it has no power over him anymore, it cannot entice him anymore, because the reality of their current relationship is much better than the fantasy back then ever was
