‘OBEX’ Review: Albert Birney’s Peculiar Genre Mash-Up Pays Homage To Analog Tech – Sundance Film Festival

Damon Wise

2 February 2025 at 12:00 pm·4-min read

“There it is,” says Computer Conor, finding the advert for his modest computer-art service in the latest issue of Personal Computing while his dog, Sandy, snuffles on the sofa. Though the aesthetic of OBEX — Albert Birney’s follow-up to the pastel-hued Strawberry Mansion (2021) — is grainy ’70s Eraserhead monochrome, appearances can be deceiving. The year is 1987, with Reagan in the White House and Madonna in the charts, but Conor (played by Birney himself) is unaware. A virtual shut-in, he sees life through a screen, even sending his neighbor Mary to do his grocery shopping.

Flipping through the magazine, an advert for a new computer game catches his eye; illustrated with a gothic castle, a satanic goat’s head and human brain, it promises a breakthrough in interactive gaming: “Can you make it to the end of the maze and defeat the demon Ixaroth before he eats your mortal soul?” To take part, all Conor has to do is film himself from various angles and fill in a brief questionnaire: What is your name? Where do you live? Who are you? The latter is about to become very important when Conor sends off $20 to Concatix Software in Pittsburgh, the makers of “OBEX.”

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Conor, 36 and a firm believer that “maybe some day we’ll all be living in computers — even dogs,” is, for his time, at the cutting edge of new technology. His home is a shrine to it; he has three TV sets, one on top of the other, surrounded by racks and racks of VHS tapes and audiocassettes. To relax, he sings pop hits like Gary Numan’s “Cars” on his homemade 8-bit karaoke setup. He is therefore disappointed to find, after popping the floppy disk containing “OBEX” into his Apple-1 computer, that this “state-of-the-art” invention is a clumsy, primitively rendered swizz. And into the trash it goes.

Or does it? Ever since laying eyes on the advert for “OBEX,” Conor has been plagued by strange dreams and portents. A cicada creeps into his printer, which sends out strange instructions (“Remove your skin”) and a symbol for a VHS tape with the words “I’m inside,” prompting Conor to go through his whole collection (looking for what?). After watching (and taping) A Nightmare on Elm Street, Conor goes to bed. While he sleeps, then TV sets burst into life and an electric wraith — the spit of his online nemesis Ixaroth — bursts out. In the morning, Conor finds that Sandy is missing, and so he is forced to venture out into the real world, into the woods behind the garden gate.

This is where Birney doubles down on all the accumulating strangeness and what was, at first, eccentric now becomes full-blown hallucinogenic. Conor, now heavily bearded, has entered the world of “OBEX,” where, guided by an ethereal, shimmering parallel-world version of Mary (who works in the gift shop selling elixirs and weaponry), he must find his way through The Dark Forest, through The Peaks of Peril and The Valley of Bones, to The Nightmare Realm — home of Ixaroth, who has taken Sandy.

It plays out like a whimsical Videodrome, with major nods to the mysterious, industrial shadows of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, though Birney doesn’t really go all-out into horror, sci-fi or even fantasy, for that matter. Like a lot of the genre films debuting at Sundance this year, OBEX is a peculiar mash-up of influences (Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess might be one comparison, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls another), which would explain its planting in the more avant-garde NEXT strand as opposed to Midnight.

Much of its fabulously creepy appeal dissipates, however, in the overly busy ending, which doesn’t really land, or even bring anything much resembling closure to the story. As in even the most sophisticated role-playing games, the best part is the journey, not so much the destination.

Title: OBEX
Festival: Sundance (NEXT)
Distributor: Magnify
Director: Albert Birney
Screenwriters: Albert Birney, Pete Ohs
Cast: Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Frank Mosley
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins

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