Dr. Conrad Smolinsky has two problems: The all-hours drum circles next door, and his dead twin brother is talking to him.
Written and directed by JJ Adler, short dramedy “The Oracle” follows Smolinsky, a lifelong atheist psychiatrist in his 70s whose sense of reality begins to erode after an absurd encounter with a con artist patient.
The film challenges the comfort of certainty and the resistance many people have to questioning their own worldview.
Adler speaks from experience. After years of dismissing the spiritual journeys of those around her, she found herself confronting the uncomfortable possibility that those woo-woo hippy people might actually be right — or at least, not wrong.
“I was around all these very woo-woo hippie people,” she joked. “And I was like, these people are so dumb. Get them out of my face. And I had an experience, and I don’t know what it means in retrospect. But then I was sitting there looking at the exact same people, like, wait a minute… am I dumb?”
What draws her isn’t just belief and certainty on their own, but the confidence with which people can hold them, especially when that confidence goes unquestioned.
“I’m always interested in people who are so sure of their point of view,” she said. “Like how? It’s impossible. I think it’s actually the people who are the least sure who act the most sure.”
And so, through Smolinsky, played by Kurt Fuller, Adler explores a man who has built both his career and identity on logic and rationality, until his patient Mark, played by Brandon Scott Jones, opens a door Smolinsky never intended to look through.
Note that the following section contains spoilers to the film.
When Mark enters Smolinsky’s life, he is every part the liar as he attempts to claim dissociative identity disorder in the hopes of securing an insanity plea instead of a criminal sentence, or so Smolinsky believes.
To Smolinsky, Mark is manipulating psychiatric language the way he’s manipulated everything else, and Smolinsky is determined to prove it. Placing Mark under hypnosis to expose the fraud, instead, Smolinsky hears four impossible words that open the ground up from beneath him.
“Be Be Osh Osh.”
Roughly translated: “Mom farted.”
It’s a phrase from the private twin language Smolinsky once shared with his brother, who died in childhood. A language no one else should know. A language Smolinsky hasn’t spoken in more than six decades.
The moment is ridiculous on its face, as Smolinsky’s face drops into a shocked seriousness at the childlike babble. And it is also devastating. With those four words, Smolinsky’s reality begins to fracture.
“I wanted to put him in a position where he feels like he’s losing his mind,” said Adler. “Because I think that’s when you have experiences like this.”
As Smolinsky’s confidence in his own reality starts to slip, his behavior spirals. The careful psychiatrist turns obsessive and reckless, and the constant percussion of the drums next door gets louder and louder. He starts following cars into alleyways, violating HIPAA with abandon, kidnapping people off the street.
“You have to be willing to kind of open yourself up to anything to have an experience like this,” said Adler. “You have to be at a point where you have nothing to lose by seeing something that could break your sense of what real life is.”
And amid the frantic drums and Smolinsky’s unraveling, Adler always pulls the film back to its comic core, reminding us that the entire spiral began because of four devastating words: “Be Be Osh Osh.” Mom farted.
“Okay, weirdly enough, my father has a degree in hypnosis. Apparently, they give out degrees for this,” joked Adler. “He’s actually a dentist, but he used it to help people who are afraid of the dentist to lessen their fear.”
While Adler agrees that hypnosis is likely more so the power of suggestion than an otherworldly experience, she considered how much those kinds of experiences are inherently internal and nearly impossible to explain to an outsider.
“I wanted to take someone who has no predisposition to believing in any of this stuff. What would it take to convince them? I thought it would be funny to see what happens,” she said. “Until you have an experience like that, you wouldn’t believe any of it is real. And maybe it’s not but it feels so real and so important to you.”
In tying this impossible, sort of insane spiritual journey to comedy, Adler acknowledges the ridiculous nature of these personal experiences, making it all the more believable.
Leaning hard into the absurdity, the final minutes of the film offer relentless percussion of the neighbor’s drum circles, visual effects sequences ascending Smolinsky into the cosmos, floating through clouds as manic laughter and celestial light collide. The image of his twin brother appears above him, tender and ridiculous all at once.
By the time Smolinsky returns to Earth, he’s no longer standing apart from the chaos next door. He’s sitting at the center of it, sitting cross-legged in the drum circle, wearing a crystal tiara, utterly broken and changed.
As Smolinsky finally accepts the message from his brother, speaking in his childhood twin language to the hypnotized con artist in his basement, his disbelief gives way to a devastating and heartbreaking moment. And its all to the soundtrack of gibberish.
“I had that experience while we were shooting it. I cannot believe this is where my life has led me. Like, this guy is spewing nonsense in this garage, and I’m crying behind the monitor,” said Adler.
The language does, in fact, translate, Adler said. Inspired by real world cases of twins developing private languages, she worked with a language writer she’d met years earlier at a conference to literally create a new language for the film.
“I wrote what I wanted the brother to say, something a 6 year old would say,” she explained. “And then she translated it into this language. He asks things like where have you been? I missed you. They have everything here. Dad’s here. Inside jokes and things like that.”
“The Oracle” is Adler’s second-ever short film and the second to premiere at Sundance.
“I really want to emphasize all the partners that made it happen that signed on to help me finish this film. It’s true — I work in commercials. And all of the people from my commercial life were so generous to come out and work on this short with me,” she said.
Though she has built her career in comedy TV commercials, she is also working on a feature film, and though much goofier, she said, it deals with similar questions and themes.
“I feel like we all have a little bit of that in each of us, where there’s certain things we don’t question about the world around us, and there’s certain frameworks we just buy into completely. I think it makes us all a little stupider,” said Adler.
Short Film Program 1 in-person screenings
- 10:20 a.m., Jan. 31, Megaplex Redstone
- 9 a.m., Feb. 1, Holiday Village Cinemas
Online
- 8 a.m. Jan. 29-11:55 p.m. Feb. 1