Fear of Rain (2021)

Fear of Rain arrives as a psychological thriller about a seventeen-year-old named Rain who lives with early onset schizophrenia, and it treats that condition as its organizing principle. She hears voices. She sees her dead mother at the breakfast table. She cannot always trust the boy who claims to believe her. The film was written and directed by Castille Landon, which lends the project a certain authenticity of perspective, though the screenplay has no interest in mounting an argument about gender. This is a potboiler with a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is the point.

On the matter of neurodivergence, the film is unusually committed. Rain's medication dulls her painting, so she stops taking it. Her classmates mock her. Her father slaps her during a medication standoff, and the film lets that ugliness sit without a lesson attached. The central twist, that her mother has been dead for three years and exists only as a hallucination, is a genuine piece of narrative construction, even if the critics found the surrounding machinery contrived. The Guardian called it a lurid potboiler stitched to a well-intentioned drama. Slant compared its psychology to Jared Leto in a superhero picture. Both verdicts are fair. What the film never does is sermonize. There is no public service announcement hiding in the basement.

The cast includes Black performers in supporting roles, and the film makes nothing of it, which is either admirable restraint or simple indifference. There is no economic critique, no environmental content, no racial commentary, no body politics. The villain is one woman with a cage, not a system. The film opened in 120 theaters and grossed a modest sum before retreating to DVD. It is a curiosity, sincere in its portrait of illness and shameless in its plotting, and it will be remembered, if at all, for the former.