The appearance of a mysterious orange light upends a fraught family Christmas, forcing their pregnant daughter to decide between the overbearing expectations of her family or her own safety.

Blending psychological horror with intimate family drama, Rain by Imogen McCluskey captures the suffocating tension of a holiday gathering unraveling in the shadow of ecological collapse. When a strange orange light interrupts a fraught family Christmas, a pregnant daughter must confront the unbearable expectations placed upon her and make a harrowing choice between familial duty and personal safety. Set in a world eerily familiar yet slowly falling apart, the film explores the terrifying dissonance between routine and reality.

Drawing inspiration from the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019, McCluskey uses the horror genre to process the quiet despair and surreal acceptance of living through climate disaster. Rain reflects on humanity’s ability to normalize crisis, clinging to tradition even as the world burns around us. Visually arresting and thematically urgent, the film is a haunting meditation on denial, survival, and the cost of pretending everything is fine.

The setting of a family Christmas amidst an apocalyptic backdrop is both familiar and unsettling. What drew you to juxtapose a traditional holiday with such a chaotic, ominous event?

The film was inspired by living through the 2019 ‘Black Christmas’ bushfires in Australia, where an area larger than the state of Montana burned for weeks across my home country. The skies were a thick orange, hellish red, apocalyptic black – and yet we were expected to continue to go to work and live our ‘normal lives’ as if the world was not falling apart around us.

It was this capacity to adapt to a ‘new normal’, even at the cost of our health, that was the kernel of this film. How far will we go, or how much will we sacrifice, to adhere to tradition; to keep things ‘normal’; to turn a blind eye?

The dissonance of a familiar Christmas setting – evoking feelings of nostalgia, normalcy, joy and togetherness – against the backdrop of a growing danger was my attempt at capturing the feeling of dread and powerlessness I felt living through those bushfires, and in a rapidly warming world. The horror in the familiar is what interests me.

Rain revolves around a pregnant daughter faced with a life-altering decision. How did you approach crafting her emotional journey, and what does her character symbolize in the context of the film?

Our protagonist Ella is a woman who is desperate to break from family tradition. She has eloped with her charming husband Leon and is expecting a child; intent on creating a life far removed from her overbearing family and suffocating mother, Deborah.

Ella’s basic emotional story is one of survival. How much will she sacrifice for her unborn child? Does she have the strength to overcome her family?

Coming back to this emotional heart helped me stay grounded in the development process.

In the purest sense, Ella represents our basic human instincts, butting up against the traditions of ‘society’, aka her family. Her internal struggle is a metaphor for the growing sense of dread and powerlessness inherent to living life on a warming planet.

Through the family structure, Rain explores the cycles of violence that shape our relationships, and attempts to reframe the audience’s view of global heating from a narrative of humans destroying our planet, to one where we are really destroying ourselves.

The mysterious light is a striking visual element. How did you develop the concept for this phenomenon, and what does it represent within the narrative?

I knew that I wanted to move away from the reality of a fire and move into the allegorical realm with this film. So the mysterious orange light represents the rising wave of danger, slowly changing colour and intensity and how it affects the characters, who behave like lobsters slowly boiling in a pot of water.

I likened the physical effects on the characters to that of radiation poisoning, where their skin starts to blister and burn, but gradually enough that they begin to accept it as the ‘new normal’. This is the most direct commentary on climate change: the more we sacrifice and adapt to the ‘new normal’ baseline, the more in danger we become.

How did real-life experiences influence the tone and themes of Rain?

Like I mentioned, this film was inspired by real events, but by leaning into the psychological horror genre and away from realism, I wanted to leave room for the audience’s interpretation, particularly with the ending.

The film ends on a tone of hope, opening the possibility that through enormous sacrifice we can end the cycles of violence and begin to move towards a new future. I think hope and agency are so important when trying to create any narrative around climate change, which is already such an overwhelming reality.

The film blends horror, drama, and psychological thriller elements. How did you balance these genres to maintain both the tension and emotional depth of the story?

I am interested in using my work to explore complex moral questions through family dynamics, and RAIN examines our ability to be willfully blind in the face of an overwhelming truth. This film asks the question: to build something new, must we purge what’s come before? I wanted to use the psychological horror genre to access an allegorical tone, heightening the horror, intensity and stakes for all the characters. Moving away from reality opened a new world for the story, both visually and emotionally. The disquiet, unease and dread we evoke in this film is a core element of the psychological horror genre. Even if the audience aren’t aware of the allegory or messaging of the film, I hope they connect with that feeling of dread and powerlessness.

Music and sound design play a crucial role in psychological thrillers. How did you use sound to heighten the tension and convey the emotional weight of the story?

Our amazing composer Isha Ram Das created the incredible score that is so important to the tone of the film. Isha and I are old friends, and he’s scored many of my films, including my debut feature ‘Suburban Wildlife’.

Taking influence from scores by composers such as Mica Levy and Philip Glass, his score pulses under the film, incorporating sound elements on screen – e.g. the scraping of plates, footsteps, breath, the bubbling of flesh, the sound of rain – and sonically altering them to build the nightmare.

A key reference for the film are the hellish paintings of Franscisco Goya, and Isha’s score beautifully captures the beauty and brutality and elegy of his work and the story we’re telling on screen.

Rain was created by an international team of AFI students. How did the collaborative process shape the final film, and what did you learn from working with such a diverse group of filmmakers?

The best part about AFI is their emphasis on collaboration, which is the most rewarding and enriching part of filmmaking! We had such an incredible team working on this film, many of whom I worked with before including our producers Chris Crema and Austin Chen, and amazing cinematographer Luísa Dalé who was so crucial in developing the story. Luísa and I worked extensively together breaking down the script into stages, drawing on references including the paintings of Francisco Goya, the darkness of The Godfather films, photography of Todd Hido and lighting design of James Turrell.
Every department was engaged in how to tell the story of the progression of the orange light on the world and to the characters. Each department broke down the script into different ‘stages’ which corresponded with the decay, like with our amazing Production Designer Mehdi Bennani who created the spectacular Christmas feast which turned into rotten food, our our HMU artist Shy Elizabeth who is the queen of sweat and facial prosthetics to show how the orange light is eating away at them.

What are the books, podcasts or even YouTube Channel that you recommend young filmmakers to get their hands on?

I really love the book ‘Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them’ by John Yorke. Instead of the more traditional screenwriting books that focus on the structural mechanics and story formulas, John dives into why stories progress the way they do. This helps centre the audience in my mind while writing, always asking the question, what will make them lean in?

For feature writers, the Craig Mazin episode of Scriptnotes where he breaks down a feature is also incredibly useful, and I revisit often.

The Cooke Optics TV Youtube channel is amazing for anyone who loves diving into the technical elements of filmmaking, and there are so many great interviews with the best cinematographers working today.

And for directors, the DGA Podcast ‘The Directors Cut’ is so great – particularly the Oscar roundtable episodes which are moderated by Jeremy Kagan who does such a great job diving into the specifics of craft, and the difficulties and joys of making movies.

Can you share with us some of your favorite short films?

I love films that do something unusual with the medium, for budget or story reasons, so really love the humour and social commentary in Ruben Ostlund’s short film, The Bank

Similarly, an Australian film by Alex Wu called Idol is really impressive, told in a single shot with an incredible central performance

And I’m an eternal fan of Alice Rohrwacher’s delicate, allegorical and deeply moving filmmaking, and loved her short film Le Pupille