A Fire In The Rain

So I hit play on this movie and I was immediately impressed! I was impressed with the sound, I was impressed with the concept but I was mostly impressed with the music. The movie establishes the characters before it even tells you what the movie is called, so there’s no time wasting here. Two or three scenes into the movie, we are introduced to this Enya-like music that really drives the film and I was almost tempted to start shedding tears. I had to check myself and remind myself that I don’t even know these people enough to come and be wasting tears. 

A Fire in the Rain is the story of a divorced couple (played by Yvonne Jegede and Deyemi Okanlawon) that are brought together again when they get the news that their sick daughter only has 3 weeks to live.

Much of the vexation from other viewers about the premise of the movie is that the couple does not immediately go into a full on priest, prophet and prophetess search. As opposed to that opinion, I think the steering away from the religiosity of it worked to make this movie a bit more original. Props to Deyemi and Yvonne for managing to bring these characters to life while maintaining the calm of their characters. Their performances aren’t forceful, at least Deyemi was not but credit still goes to Yvonne for keeping it down for a majority of the movie.

Now of course the movie is not without its flaws and one of the major ones is the flashbacks. There is a ludicrous amount of flashbacks in this movie that it just becomes confusing. There’s a white background added to the beginning of the flashback scenes but even that is not enough to help us keep straight what scene is a flashback and which is not. In fact at one point there was a flashback within a flashback and that’s when I gave up. Eventually I caught on to a trick. I paid attention to Yvonne’s character’s hairstyles – whenever she had the braids it was the past and whenever she had the curly wig it was the present – or thereabouts. 

In the end, a fire in the rain gains beaucoup of points for the music but also gains points for originality. The story is not typical and for the most part it works. The child actress does a decent job but sometimes it’s hard for her to convince us that she’s sick and dying, and depend on how much attention you are paying to the movie you can actually argue that the end was a bit unpredictable.