Rain
2023 · 17m · USA
Directed by Imogen McCluskey
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
When a strange orange light begins infecting the air on Christmas Day, a pregnant woman attempts to warn her family of the impending danger while wrestling against their overbearing traditions and expectations of her future. Inspired by Australia's 2019 Black Christmas bushfires, the film uses the horror genre to process quiet despair and the surreal acceptance of living through climate catastrophe.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Christmas horror where the actual disaster is outside and the family refuses to look — this is the kind of premise that makes me want to grab people by the collar and say 'do you understand what they're doing here?'
Imogen McCluskey renders Australia's 2019 bushfires as a suffocating family-Christmas horror film where collective denial is the real monster — Hereditary-adjacent in the right way, with climate catastrophe as ambient dread.
Ecological collapse staged as suffocating family-Christmas horror, where the real monster is collective denial — climate dread filtered through Australia's 2019 Black Christmas. That's a precise way to make the apocalyptic register feel domestic.
Festivals
- DeadCenter Film Festival 2023
- AFI Fest 2023
- Hollyshorts Film Festival 2023