‘Leviticus’ Ending, Explained
Indie horror continues making waves with Leviticus (2026) arriving in theaters just in time for Pride Month. Starring Talk to Me’s (2022) Joe Bird and Crazy Fun Park’s (2023) Stacy Clausen, this Australian film is part horror and part romance. It tells the story of the violent entity that haunts two teenage boys who have fallen in love.
To help you better understand everything that Leviticus is about, let’s break down the key points of this movie and how it ends. How this cursed entity actually works, when it becomes violent, and its weakness are also covered. And to tie it off, let’s talk about if Ryan and Naim get a happy ending. Spoiler alert: it’s complicated.
What Is ‘Leviticus’ About?
Leviticus is the story of two teenage boys who must escape the violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire the most, aka each other. The two teenagers in question are Naim and Ryan. Naim has just moved to this small town with his mother after the loss of his father, and Ryan is a classmate of his. Both Naim and Ryan also attend the same church, where they don’t talk but consistently catch each other’s eyes. Outside of school and church, they hang out alone, their friendship turning romantic as they share stolen kisses.
At one point in the film, Naim catches Ryan with the pastor’s son. They’re punishing each other by throwing rocks before they kiss. Confused and a little hurt, Naim tells the pastor’s father. Ryan and the son are then brought in front of the church, where a mysterious man performs a ritual with fire that incapacitates both teenagers and sets a curse upon them as a means of killing their sexual desires.
It’s at this point that Ryan starts avoiding Naim because the curse takes the form of the person they desire the most. And Ryan desires Naim. Naim tries to help Ryan with the curse, both of them battling their desires, and Naim feels guilt for revealing Ryan’s secret. It all comes to a point where Naim’s mother finds out about her son’s homosexual desires, and the same ritual is done to him. Naim desires Ryan, so that’s who he sees throughout the film.
How Does ‘Leviticus’ End?
After a failed attempt at finding out if they can break the curse, Ryan finds out that Naim is the one who let the pastor know that Ryan kissed his son. This betrayal hurts Ryan greatly, and he tells Naim that if he ever sees Ryan again, not to trust him because he’s never going to see Ryan again. After that, Naim has a harrowing encounter with the curse that leads to fire being discovered as its weakness.
Then, Ryan disappears. No one can find him, and a whole search party forms. Naim and his mother are part of the search party, and he learns the truth from her about the curse. She knew that this would happen to him and that it could never be reversed. She also knew what the curse would do and that it could hurt her son. But she did it anyway because she would rather have him cursed than live a homosexual life. This breaks Naim.
When Naim and his mother stop at a gas station, the mother returns to find the car empty. Naim has also disappeared. What actually happened, though, is that he started walking. The lengths his mother would go to stop him from loving another boy were too much for him to handle. And his walking leads him to a bus stop where he sees Ryan.
Both boys stare at each other, afraid that the other isn’t real, until a bus approaches and people spill out of the bus. Realizing that the other is real, they decide to run away together. Because if this curse is going to follow them for the rest of their lives, they’d rather face it together. And as they’re cuddled up on the bus, you see the cursed version of Ryan on the side of the road as they make their way out of the town.
How Does The Curse In ‘Leviticus’ Work?
After the old man curses Ryan, the pastor’s son, and Naim, they are haunted by an entity that takes the form of the person they desire most. The pastor’s son desires Ryan the most, so he sees him. Ryan and Naim desire each other the most, so they see each other. The entity, in its simplest form, is a form of temptation. No one else can see it besides the person cursed, and it doesn’t appear where others can see.
For example, when Ryan appears to Naim, it looks like him, acts like him, and talks like him. But only Naim can see him. This entity draws in Naim every single time; the temptation is strong between them. If Naim gives in to his desires for Ryan, the entity becomes violent and tries to kill Naim as punishment for his sexual desires. It’s conversion therapy with a brutal punishment if you give in, and it’s in line with the Bible’s Book of Leviticus, which serves as an instruction manual to achieve “purity.”
The entity that attacks Ryan, Naim, and the pastor’s son doesn’t feel pain. It can be attacked and just get back up again like nothing. Its only weakness is fire, which Naim discovers when it attacks him in his home. But it’s not enough to kill it, despite the entity being engulfed in flames after Naim traps it.
Do Naim And Ryan Have A Happy Ending In ‘Leviticus’?
If we ignore the entire context and point of this film, some viewers of Leviticus might see Naim and Ryan’s ending as a sad one. They made it out of that small town and away from the bigoted church, but the curse that has fallen upon both of them, and the entity that is trying to tempt them and hurt them, is still there. But again, thinking this way misses the entire point of this film.
If we were to compare Leviticus to our current world, the entity is conversion therapy. It’s also the morals and values of a puritanical society that praises virtue with one hand and then hits you with violence with the other. It’s about falling in line and killing your own wants or desires because someone else decided that what you feel as a queer person, what comes naturally to you as breathing, isn’t right because reasons.
Keeping all of this in mind, as a queer writer, I believe that Ryan and Naim did get a happy ending in Leviticus. In the face of that entity, or that puritanical society, they chose love. They chose to stay at each other’s side, to build a future together, and not to let fear steal something precious from both of them. They chose to be their truest self, not hiding from their queerness or punishing themselves because of it.
Naim and Ryan’s choices at the end of Leviticus are a reflection of queer people in our current society. Because there are consistently people trying to change their children with conversion therapy, lawmakers trying to take away queer people’s rights, and those in puritanical spaces preach that being queer is a sin, as violence against queer people continues.
Nevertheless, queer people chose to love each other, be themselves, and build the kind of future that makes it easier for the next generation. That is what Naim and Ryan are doing at the end of Leviticus. Despite an uncertain future or the possible violence that could come with loving each other, they chose love first.
