‘Rain Catcher’ review: A London street photographer loses his grip on reality in intriguing, twisty neo-noir

Dir: Michele Fiascaris. UK. 2026. 109mins

A street photographer pushes boundaries with his voyeuristic work, but his dedication to his art lands him in murky psychological waters. The brooding feature debut of short filmmaker Michele Fiascaris, Rain Catcher is extremely dark and gloomy – both visually and thematically. Yet, beneath its oppressive surface, it proves an intriguingly knotty exploration of more nuanced ideas about creative expression, memory and guilt.

Turns the brutalist landscape of London’s Barbican into a labyrinthine anonymous underworld 

The feature is an extension of Fiascaris’s 2018 short of the same name, which premiered at Sitges, and sees former boxer and Top Boy star Dudley O’Shaughnessy returning to the central role. His balanced, enigmatic performance, together with the presence of independent film favourite Kate Dickie, should help the film attract further festival attention following its premiere in the Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary. Asserting itself beyond the homeground market may be more of a challenge, although at the very least it marks Fiascaris as a talent to watch.

Rain Catcher is the handle Miles (O’Shaughnessy) uses for his anonymous social media account. Miles hides his identity for a reason; he takes candid photographs of regular people he sees around London – including using a telephoto lens to zoom into windows – often at their most vulnerable, and always without their knowledge or consent. He has a flippant lack of conscience about the entire exercise, calling it ‘a game of hide and seek’. Despite his questionable approach, his work is popular; he has over 500,000 followers and is through to the finals of a high-profile national photography competition.

Miles also earns a meagre living by snapping high-profile figures in compromising positions; an opening sequence sees him, girlfriend Cassie (Ivy Law) and heavy Roy (Youssef Kerkour) attempting to catch out a slimy music industry exec. When the sting goes south, Cassie disappears, Miles starts to sink into a haze of paranoia, and the film begins to flirt with genre elements. A strange woman (Kate Dickie) begins turning up in his photographs, and then covert images of Miles start appearing on his social media and around the neighbourhood. As he develops a friendship with kindly neighbour Yumi (Jessie Mei Li), Miles begins to lose his grip on reality – not helped by recurring nightmares featuring scorpions and buckets of blood.

Co-writing with Filippo Polesel, Fiascaris keeps things wilfully abstract – aside from several instances of clunky expositionary dialogue – and holds the audience at a deliberate remove. The film does not hold Miles up as some kind of vigilante creative crusader, nor does it vilify him, and O’Shaughnessy does well to expose the vulnerability that fuels the character’s bravado. He is a lonely man operating in a moral liminal space, his camera acting as a barrier between himself and the invasive truth of what he’s doing. (The fact that the entire city is crawling with official CCTV is an irony not lost on Miles.) He truly believes that there is beauty to be found in his subjects’ real, unvarnished selves – although, as becomes clear, he is completely unable to connect with his own personal truths

This unsettling, uncanny tone also informs atmospheric, neo-noir lensing from cinematographer Evgeny Sinelnikov, who turns the brutalist landscape of London’s Barbican into a labyrinthine, anonymous underworld of wrong turns and bad decisions, where genuine human connection is difficult to come by. And while the shadowy, subdued colour palette often feels muddy, this claustrophobic milieu suits this story of a man teetering precariously on the edge; an unease keenly reflected in a jittery electronic score from composer/producer Aeph.

Reflections – in mirrors, camera lenses, windows and the endless London rain – are an obvious but well-utilised recurring motif, as Miles is forced to face up to the consequences of his actions and buried secrets rise to the surface. As they do, the screenplay takes a sharp turn which throws previous events into sharp relief; while savvy viewers may be unsurprised by where Rain Catcher ends up, Fiascaris shows great promise in steering his film confidently through its many twists and turns.