Fear of the Rain Review – Magnetic, Gripping, Suspenseful

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Category: Film

Published on Friday, 22 January 2021 15:29

Written by Janet Walker

Fear of Rain, a Lionsgate presentation, presents a contemporary mental health drama, which delves into the mind of a barely functioning teenager diagnosed with schizophrenia, and horrifying images, voices, and feelings that seek to overwhelm her.

The film begins as Rain Burroughs, played by Madison Iseman, is running from a Slenderman type image, a haunting faceless figure, chasing her, capturing her, and burying her alive.

In her mind she escapes the horrifying terror and awakens in the hospital where her parents, Michelle, and John Burroughs, played by Katherine Heigl and Harry Connick Jr., are trying to convince her not to fight the restraints.

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Soon she is released and returns to her home, where we see the daily struggles she faces as her mind takes on a life of its own, uncontrolled, and tormented. She unwarps her bandaged hand and see maggots crawling through the wounds, she blinks, and they are gone.

Throughout the film we understand through the sessions she has with her mental health psychologist, schizophrenics are given a set of questions when the episodes overwhelm, such as "are others reacting?" and "Is it possible?" She runs through these questions, which are added on the screen at points when her reality is blurred with torment.

One night she hears a scream and looks out her window to see a small child in the attic of the neighbor. She is sure the image is real. Her history with mental illness destroys her credibility and as the home is of a local teacher, Dani McConnell, played by Eugenie Bonurant.

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But when Rain insists against her parents' advice that the shadows and cries from her neighbor's attic are real and her teacher is hiding a dark secret, to put an end to this illusion, they walk across the street and explain.

She offers to show them the attic, which is filled with dolls, of every kind, John understands how it appears and Rain is convinced what she saw was real. After a second incident, Rain is told they will remove her and institutionalize her if she insists on harassing this person.

Trying to readjust to high school, she meets Caleb, played by Israel Broussard, as he is the new kid and she the outcast, the two are drawn together. Caleb, who has no knowledge of mental illness, tries to understand as Rain deals extensively with imaginary images.

After explaining the situation to him he agrees to help her as she is convinced the child is real.

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Fear of Rain is a terrifying thriller that takes the viewer inside the torment of mental illness. Confronting frightening hallucinations attempting to determine if the danger is real or imagined.

As the film tunnels deeper into the mind of the main character as she tries to figure out which of the disturbing images, traumatic feelings and threatening voices which mock, ridicule, and tell her to commit suicide, are real and which are all in her mind, the audience is left to sort of the fact from fiction, which is at times easy to determine and at others no so simple.

Fear of Rain, is a race against time thriller, pitting evil and darkness against truth. And really presents a haunting and often overlooked reality that even those who appear "normal" have the capacity to hide deep and heinous secrets.

A gripping and traumatic film. The ensemble cast are compelling in their performance taking this material and presenting it with graphic realism. A horror film blended into contemporary mental health issues, and all the challenges that accompany those issues, the meds, the panic, the mental overload, and loss of credibility, coupled with the bouts of torture and terror, magnetically draws the viewer into this world and holds on.

Fear of Rain opens everywhere February 12, 2021. See it.

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Year - 2021.

Runtime - 104 minutes.

Country - USA.

Language - English.

Director/Writer - Castille Landon.

Producers - Dori A. Rath, p.g.a., Joseph J. Restraino, p.g.a., Robert Molloy, and Joe Riley.

Cast - Katherine Heigl, Madison Iseman, Israel Broussard, Eugenie Bondurant, and Harry Connick Jr.