Mark Reviews Movies: FEAR OF RAIN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 12, 2021

Writer/director Castille Landon opens Fear of Rain like a typical horror movie. A teenage girl is being chased through the woods by an anonymous figure, dressed in a cloak. She can't evade the man, though, who ties her up, drags her to a shallow grave, and buries her alive. After digging herself free, the teen is tackled again by her pursuer, and with a quick and jarring cut, Landon reveals the true horror of the girl's situation.

Rain (Madison Iseman) is actually in a hospital, strapped to a gurney and being injected with some kind of drug. Through some side conversation, we immediately learn the truth: The girl has schizophrenia and just had a psychotic episode, after trying to wean herself off her medication. Her mother Michelle (Katherine Heigl) and father John (Harry Connick Jr.) watch, helpless and exhausted. A doctor mentions that institutionalization might be the best option for Rain, but John refuses.

This juxtaposition—of a haunting hallucination, presented in a familiar mode, and the reality of what's actually happening to Rain—is an intriguing conceit. There is, perhaps, no way to really know what it's like to experience the effects of a mental illness such as schizophrenia. Landon's framing of a psychotic episode within the familiar beats and methods of a horror movie certainly gives us a shared and easily comprehensible representation of that experience. It's a bit daring and potentially questionable, of course, but the ultimate success or inherent flaw of that choice really comes down to Landon's intentions with this character, Rain's condition, and the story that will evolve from the introduction.

The main question to consider here is whether Rain's mental health issue is treated with thoughtfulness and compassion or if it's simply employed as a gimmick for some other tale. Landon's screenplay definitely tries to look at Rain and her condition with a level of sympathy, giving us standalone scenes of her confronting the symptoms, of the cruelty of people who don't understand and possess no desire to even try to understand what she's going through, and of her parents' frustration with being unable to help their daughter. These scenes work, more or less, because they're grounded in a real sense of wanting to communicate both the experience of schizophrenia and the challenges of living with it, as well as near it.

There is, though, an entirely different story being told for the most part here. It's a pretty typical thriller, in which Rain suspects her neighbor/teacher (played by Eugenie Bondurant) has abducted a child, can't convince anyone that her suspicions are worth looking into, and decides to investigate the matter on her own.

We've seen this particular story—of a person convinced a crime has been committed but who faces disbelief at every turn—before, of course. If one were cynical, the thought might be that Landon is simply using the fact of her protagonist's mental illness as a way to differentiate her spin on this narrative from other examples of it. By the time the movie has gone through its forced questions about reality and assorted twists, the cynical side of the argument seems much more reasonable.

The main plot begins when Rain believes that she sees a young girl through the window of her neighbor's attic. The woman has no children of her own, and when Rain and John ask the woman about what Rain thinks she saw, there is no one in the attic. Rain keeps seeing and hearing the girl, though, so under threat of the neighbor calling the cops and having her institutionalized, Rain starts investigating with the help of a new classmate named Caleb (Israel Broussard).

Caleb becomes a bit of a mystery, too, since Rain isn't entirely certain if he's real or just a hallucination. This question could be resolved quite easily (She could ask anyone in school directly or indirectly about Caleb or just invite him over to meet her parents), especially since we repeatedly see Rain going through a mental checklist to determine what's real and what's imagined. The fact that Landon's screenplay retains this puzzle about Caleb's existence for as long as it does, though, definitely doesn't help the case that it cares about Rain's condition outside of the conventions and contrivances of the plot.

Indeed, the movie often contradicts itself in terms of how it treats and feels about Rain's schizophrenia. It's what makes Rain herself, according to Caleb, which is met with a smile from the girl, but her illness is also not, according to Rain, what defines her. To be fair, schizophrenia isn't the only thing that defines Rain within the context of this story, because her status as a pawn to the various psychological twists and uncertainties of the plot is even higher on that short list. The biggest twist here, established and made inevitable by the question of Caleb's existence, feels like an act of narrative sleight-of-hand.

There's a lot of trickery in Fear of Rain. That's to be expected of a thriller, but those expectations make the movie a bit too disingenuous in its attempt to sincerely and compassionately examine a character with mental health issues.

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