“Fear of Rain” (2021) shows us life through Rain’s eyes. Rain (Madison Iseman) is a schizophrenic teen who confuses reality with her hallucinations. If there is one more complaint against her, she will be institutionalized forever as an adult. After her most recent hospital stay, only her parents (Harry Connick Jr. and Katherine Heigl) keep her company. Her former friends shun her until Caleb (Happy Death Day’s Israel Broussard) befriends her, but is he real? Caleb is the only one who validates her suspicions that her next-door neighbor, their teacher (Eugenie Bondurant), kidnapped a little girl.
I figured out the initial twist in “Fear of Rain” quickly so if you can figure it out, you may find it challenging to stay engaged in the movie because you will see all the tricks coming. The film deserves kudos for the opening scenes which provide the bedrock of the movie’s premise: juxtaposing what Rain thinks that she is seeing with reality. Because the movie relies on an unreliable narrator to create suspense, once she leaves the hospital, the filmmakers want the viewers to be confused to elevate a mashup story about a teen girl finding romance despite her flaws and the classic teen detective story solving crimes that no adult takes seriously, but Rain is special and can see things that others miss.
“Fear of Rain” never blends these stories effectively. Until either story can stand up on its own and make a good movie, they should not be combined. Rain’s life as an ordinary teenager with mental illness is not really teased out. It could have been an indie film that did not exploit mental health struggles to attract audiences interested in horror, or it could completely embrace the exploitation and make a good scary movie. I would have watched either film.
To link the two, Rain’s relationship with Caleb and her mental health would have to be more of a given than a developing storyline/relationship and more focus would have to be given to the quotidian aspects of coping with mental illness. If there was a scene that bugged me the most, it was when her pill bottle spills, everyone stares at her. (I also hated that she did not pick up every pill when I could see a few that were right in front of her. Those things are expensive.) In high school, would not a lot of the kids be nagging her for a hit or swapping pills? Yes, some would tease her, but everybody? “Fear of Rain” does take place in Florida, a heavily medicated state, in the twenty-first century. If she has so many pills in her medicine cabinet, how does she only have one bottle in her bag. Would not she have a whole pill organizer in there or require at least a daily visit to the school nurse? Would not all those pills have side effects like weight gain? What does schizophrenia look like when your next-door neighbor does not kidnap kids, and you are a teenage girl? Rain needed a foil, an ordinary teenage girl without that diagnosis to compare their experiences.
By the end of the movie, I realized that including Rain, there was not a single girl or woman character who could be considered average—not nice or mean—other than the alleged kidnapped victim. They had major flaws, which makes characters interesting, but made the guys seem long suffering, ordinary yet attractive schlubs. Castille Landon, the writer and director, is a woman, but she really pushed the trope that girls and women are crazy, super mean or deeply disturbed, which undermined the exploitative parts of “Fear of Rain.”
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If you watch “Fear of Rain,” there is a character that is so blatantly creepy that you will think, “She is weird.” The film completely plays into stereotypes, which drains the film of all its suspense—beauty equals good, and unique features equals bad. I would have preferred if the film had to have a kidnapper character, then the film should have cast a less obvious choice so the audience could have credible doubts. Bondurant does not adhere to the aesthetic beauty standard of our times. Bondurant has been cast as a transman, and she could find her acting niche as the woman Doug Jones if she and casting directors wanted her in those roles. My friend who suggested and watched the film with me felt as if the film was playing into twenty-first century transphobia fears.
Bondurant and the writers manage to create some doubt when her character directly addresses Rain’s suspicions. It is one of the best, unexpected moments in the film. Unfortunately the rest of the film prefers to make her not only a kidnapper of little girls, but has a side hustle as a mastermind gaslighter who undermines people’s faith in Rain and seeks to have Rain institutionalized by making Rain doubt her own sanity. This extra level of sinister machinations combined with the stereotype makes for an intriguing villain without the necessary groundwork.
Rain’s major delusion is being kidnapped by a person in a hoodie and buried alive. While this delusion could be a visual metaphor for medical professionals restraining her and the drugs making her true self feel suffocated, it also corresponds with a real-life event unfolding in the film. From the dialogue, we know the teacher filed the first complaint, probably as a preemptive strike against Rain reporting her to the police. If the teacher kidnapped the child in North Carolina, the film should have started with the foundational idea that Rain witnessed something which triggered her most recent break with reality and fed into this delusion. Based on my inexpert Google search, kidnapping is not a common schizophrenic delusion, but delusions of persecutions, reference, grandeur, and control. The film should have used the characteristics of the illness to make the audience work harder at figuring out if the kidnapping was real and put more effort into the kidnapper’s psychological profile. The film seemed to effectively use auditory hallucinations well, but the visual ones were lazy horror film tropes.
Because I have seen “The Sixth Sense,” I knew that the mother was not real and dead—the father never speaks directly to her and did not open her car door, and Caleb was real because he occasionally disagrees with Rain’s ideas. Also at one point, Rain wears a tank top that says, “I got it from my mama,” and “it” refers to mental illness. Also in a scene when she is painting her mom, and the camera angle shifts, the mother is not visible from the dad’s perspective.
The best reason to watch “Fear of Rain” is Harry Connick Jr. I never understood why people found him attractive clean shaven, but with a little bit of facial hair, I finally see it! He is very hot as sad dad. Watch him paint rooms blue! Watch him cook! Watch him hug his daughter! 10 out of 10.
