Here is a film (I think it’s a TV pilot actually?) that defies the stereotypes of a film festival dedicated to breaking mental health stereotypes. It’s silly, irreverent, and possibly offensive at times. It’s about Jermaine, “the best pot-washer in America,” who copes with three mental health diagnoses: Bipolar II, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, and PTSD. All of them manifest as voices in his head and as characters in the film. Most laugh-out-loud hilarious to me was the lollipop-toting little girl who plays his Intermittent Explosive Disorder and admonishes him, “Are you gonna let him speak to you that way?”
This short has some pretty clever, pithy insights into black culture and mental health, such as when Jermaine tells his therapist “Now I see why black people don’t go to therapy,” and she responds that “black dollars” paid for her therapy couch. The actors, especially Jermaine and his girlfriend Bianca, have a natural charisma and chemistry that elevates their amateur status. It’s Clinical has an impressive, some might say excessive, number of musical sequences for a 30-minute runtime. Yet for a film that is so colorful and silly, it also has some shockingly accurate kernels of truth in Jermaine’s inner monologues, including his Bipolar 2 voice convincing him he deserves to splurge on a coat, or his PTSD eloquently and clearly explaining one of the key concepts many people don’t actually understand about PTSD, which is that rather than being a literal embodiment of past trauma, it’s more often a trigger that makes you re-live elements of the trauma again.
The characters playing the voices of different mental health diagnoses in It’s Clinical may come across as a little goofy at times and perhaps even reductive and simplistic. Some of the acting and sound is inconsistent, and the film takes many risks that certainly do not all pay off. There’s an odd subplot with Bianca that could seem problematic but might also be part of the film’s dark humor. This is just one of those original oddities where you have to accept what it is and roll with it. In the final analysis (haha), this is the kind of messy, imperfect, but interesting and unclassifiable personal passion project that we tend to love.
Watch It’s Clinical in Shorts Block No. 1 of the virtual fest now through 11/3: ttps://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6702035e87db8a002622348d
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