Filmed under the title I Saw a Man with Yellow Eyes - yes, there's a bit of a giallo in this - Fear of Rain sat was released in theaters - the ones still open - last week and then went straight to video - yes, they still sell DVDs - and streaming.
Written and directed by Castille Landon, this is the story of Rain Burroughs (Madison Iseman, Tales of Halloween, Annabelle Comes Home), a young girl with vivid memories of being chased through the woods by a killer. She wakes in an emergency room with her parents (Katherine Heigl - who is still in movies - and Harry Connick Jr.) and from that moment forward, everything may or may not be real, including love interest Caleb (Israel Broussard, Happy Death Day) and the child being hidden in the attic of her next-door neighbor and teacher Dani McConnell (Eugenie Bondurant).
The movie spends most of its time - perhaps too much of it - on Castille's trials in school and in starting to romance Caleb to the point that it never builds McConnell into anything more than a cipher. That said, using the mental illness of the lead to make her an unreliable narrator works for the movie, even if some moments, like the evil version of herself showing up in a mirror, falls into tropes that the movie struggles and mostly succeeds to overcome.
Between the dollhouses of McConnell - again, never really explained or explored - and the fact that more than one of the characters in the movie may be living in our heroine's head, this movie does have that one foot in the world of the murder thriller, but never takes the full leap into being fully strange. And that's fine - this is meant for a younger audience and not the devotees of Martino, Argento, Lenzi and Lado. It certainly kept my attention for its running time, which is a testament that few modern movies are able to claim.
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