Review: “OBEX”

Cocooned from the shrill clicking of the 17-year cicada brood outside by the static buzz of his television sets— three, to be exact, stacked one on top of the other and nestled against a vast wall of VHS tapes— Conor (Albert Birney) lives a life of pleasant seclusion, drawing comfort from the company of his dog Sandy and the softly glowing screens of the tech surrounding him. OBEX (which is directed by Birney and co-written by him and Peter Ohs) is set in 1987, a key transitional time before internet but when home media was becoming more prevalent and computer graphics were becoming rapidly more advanced, but it powerfully echoes present day reliance on technology, where easy accessibility to an infinite menagerie of games and videos and news outlets and social media and AI chatbots that can accomplish everything from forming a grocery list to crafting the perfect dating app profile to phrasing something delicate you need to say to another person just so by merely entering a string of text has made it far too simple to retreat into the bubbles of our existence. Fans of Birney’s previous feature, 2022’s Strawberry Mansion (which he co-directed with Kentucker Audley), will find a more linear narrative in OBEX that doesn’t quite possess the former’s heady romanticism and mind-warping dream logic. What it does exhibit, however, is a similar understanding of deep-seated loneliness and how machines bring people together as much as they isolate them.

OBEX derives its title from the name of a new computer game Conor stumbles across in an ad in a computer magazine. It only takes a few short scenes for Birney to get across Conor’s reclusive existence. His trips outside are limited to the backyard where he lets Sandy out; he doesn’t even open the door for his neighbor, Mary (Callie Hernandez), who delivers his groceries to him, and whose kind but incessant reminders that she’s circling a new job and may be moving soon Conor demurs from fully acknowledging. He spends his time taping everything from commercials to horror movies off the TV, singing karaoke before bed, and “drawing” portraits of people on his boxy old Mac by painstakingly typing out strings of slashes and dots to form shapes. On the surface, OBEX appears to be an appropriate change of pace for him. He just has to send in an interview tape and some photos of him taken at different angles in various poses, and the creators will insert him in the game; it’s a new adventure that still doesn’t require him to leave his desk. When Conor receives the game, its so-called state-of-the-art technology is comically rudimentary; it takes a few clacks of the keys to force his character (a photo of himself striking an action pose) to stiltedly maneuver across the screen, a white void with the exception of a horse (named after his dog) and a castle that represents his kingdom. But soon, things get weird, as the game world bleeds into reality and vice versa, eventually pulling Sandy into the virtual realm, and forcing Conor to venture out of his comfort zone to save the one living thing he really loves.

OBEX trenchantly articulates how nostalgia informs our conscious and subconscious lives, succeeding as a delightful homage to the things that kept folks of a certain generation up at night— reruns of A Nightmare on Elm Street on cable late at night, fantasy games populated with kind strangers and fearsome creatures where the entire fate of the world rests in the player’s hands— while existing as one of those things on its own. It’s a horror movie shot in stark black-and-white, it’s a playful interpretation of early video game mechanics, it’s a classic adventure yarn, and it’s a thoughtful reckoning with the ways that past familial wounds manifest themselves in present-day hurts. As with Birney’s previous projects, OBEX is a real indie movie, making use of a small and familiar cast and crew (even Birney’s own dog plays Sandy) and wildly creative DIY effects that range from the pixelated graphics of early games to animated skeletons to giant cicada creatures, accented by a vibrant soundscape and the mellifluous chimes of Josh Dibb’s synth score, while Ohs’ cinematography grants it a lo-fi aesthetic. It’s wonderfully bizarre and deeply unsettling, but also gently moving, in no small part thanks to the heartfelt emotions that ring throughout the script and Birney’s line readings, soft-spoken but with a frequently curious edge. This is a film in which a key supporting player is a seemingly all-knowing man with a TV for a head (Frank Mosley), and it is also a film in which said man with a TV for a head delivers a lovely monologue about the family who used to watch his screen that will absolutely shatter you. For a film that digs deep down so many tangible and intangible layers, its pacing is rather haphazard, while its final few minutes wrap up both Conor’s physical quest and inner turmoil in an overly tidy fashion. And yet, it’s a movie that— not unlike a stray cicada wriggling its way into your home— burrows into the brain with its soul-stirring strangeness, and provokes questions as to just how thoroughly we are shaped by the media we engage with and the technology that we use every day.

OBEX opens in select theaters January 9, and screens locally at Arkadin Cinema & Bar on January 24. It will be available to watch on all digital platforms beginning February 6. Runtime: 90 minutes.