Review | Berlin 2024: Some Rain Must Fall movie review – Chinese drama by Cannes best short film winner Qiu Yang exposes cracks in middle-class family life
- Qiu Yang, who won the best short film award at Cannes in 2017, returns with a drama about a woman whose family begins to fall apart after a freak accident
- With its expressive camera work and underlying sense of impending doom, Qiu’s movie critiques the dysfunctional lives of China’s moderately rich
4/5 stars
It is substantial and stylish and revolves around a woman weighed down by the ever-widening cracks within her family, and her long-suppressed doubts about her desires in her comfortable middle-class life.
Anchored by Yu Aier’s remarkably nuanced turn as the woman careering towards a complete breakdown, Some Rain Must Fall offers bristling family drama with elements drawn from film noir and suspenseful psychological thrillers.
But the film is neither derivative nor expansive, and is bolstered by Qiu’s taut screenplay and cinematographer Constanze Schmitt’s chiaroscuro-lit camerawork – which manages to transform a nondescript city into a combination of pallid interiors and shadowy neon-lit streets.
Set in an anonymous city in mainland China – it is, in fact, Qiu’s hometown, Changzhou, in Jiangsu province – Some Rain Must Fall unfolds across three days of its protagonist’s life after an accident at her daughter’s high school.
