Anonymous Content has signed Melbourne-based writer-director Adrian Chiarella for representation, beating out several other companies that had been courting him.
The move comes on the heels of Chiarella’s feature directorial debut, “Leviticus,” a queer horror film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to strong critical response. The story centers on two teenage boys whose romance turns fatal after a violent conversion therapy ritual, after which they find themselves hunted by a malevolent presence that appears to each of them in the shape of the other.
Reviewing the film for Variety, Carlos Aguilar described “Leviticus” as “a tightly conceived, gripping queer horror that reaches for unassuming brilliance through a supernatural premise that’s as terrifying as it is thematically relevant,” and wrote “this outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curling fright with incisive social commentary.”
Causeway Films produced “Leviticus,” and Neon picked up the buzzy title in a seven-figure deal. From there it traveled to further festival dates at SXSW and in Sydney before opening theatrically. The cast includes Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen Jeremy Blewitt and Ewen Leslie.
“I’d noticed there was this shift in the air in the last five or 10 years, at least in Australia, of a regression of a lot of the rights LGBTQIA+ people had fought so hard for,” Chiarella told Variety about the film. “Particularly in the language we were hearing in our political sphere, and also microaggressions in day-to-day life. I wanted to make a film about that, but I didn’t want to go backwards as a filmmaker. I wanted to do something a little bit newer and a bit more personal. So I thought about the kinds of films that I watched at that time in my life when I was going through experiences similar to the ones in this film. They were horror movies, basically. And I think, like a lot of young queer people, I turned to that genre because of the way it explored otherness and that destabilizing feeling some of us have on our journey to self-discovery. So I brought the two things together, and I realized, ‘Horror is the genre of fear.’ It’s where we ask the audience, ‘What are you really scared of?’ And that felt like the right space to explore homophobia in all its different shades.”
Chiarella has built a reputation as one of Australia’s most closely watched emerging filmmakers, earning recognition for storytelling seen as emotionally resonant and for a genre-bending approach to horror.
His television credits include “Totally Completely Fine” for Sundance Now, “Erotic Stories” for SBS and “Five Bedrooms” for Paramount+.
Chiarella remains represented by WME, Jeff Hynick at Jackoway Austen Tyerman and Joel Petterson at Cameron’s Management in Australia.