Oppressive yet poetic and melancholy film about people obsessed by events in their early youth. Image in the Rain plays with symbols from nature and examines the theme of the transience of youth.The Funai family has three members: father, mother and their six-year-old son Shohei. Mr Mishimura – a slender, bespectacled and middle-aged man who, like the Funais, just moved into the area – displays an excessive interest in the boy. Shohei stares out of the window all the time and is also fascinated by the weather: it rains when the sun shines, what is known as ‘kituneno yomeiri’. The other inhabitants of theblock in which the Funais live are a single mother and her daughter. The families soon come into contThe Funai family has three members: father, mother and their six-year-old son Shohei. Mr Mishimura – a slender, bespectacled and middle-aged man who, like the Funais, just moved into the area – displays an excessive interest in the boy. Shohei stares out of the window all the time and is also fascinated by the weather: it rains when the sun shines, what is known as ‘kituneno yomeiri’. The other inhabitants of theblock in which the Funais live are a single mother and her daughter. The families soon come into contact with each other.Mr Funai lost his brother in a boating accident. Mishimura always carries a marble in his pocket – a personal fetish that lets him ‘see’ things from the past. He also lost his brother at an early age. One day Mishimura takes father and son Funai to a waterfall in the mountains. He starts playing a dangerous game with them that will prove fatal to all of them. The lives and stories of the characters are linked together in some frightening way.
