Albert Birney’s strange quest takes an introspective man through a mix of lo-fi media, high fantasy, and surreal horror. Plus there’s a cute dog!
In 1987, Conor Marsh (Albert Birney) lives alone. His days are defined by ritual, silence, and the company of his dog Sandy. He’s a self-employed ASCII artist taking portrait commissions via newspaper classifieds, avoiding eye contact with the neighbour who brings him groceries, and spending his evenings watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on his stack of three cathode-ray TVs.
Then, one night, a cryptic commercial offers him a way out: send in a VHS tape of yourself, and you’ll receive a fantasy game called OBEX, starring you. He does. Weeks later, a floppy disk arrives. When he loads it up, OBEX turns out to be a painfully dull RPG in which a clumsily rendered Conor must reach a castle and kill a demon. Disillusioned, he switches it off. But the real illusions are only just beginning – and when his dog vanishes into the game’s world, Conor must follow.
Birney, who co-wrote the film with Pete Ohs, returns to the handmade surrealism of Strawberry Mansion but pares it down. Where that film leaned into candy-coloured psychedelia, Obex has a kind of monochrome pensiveness. The materials are the same – ramshackle fantasy built from nostalgic media – but the tone is gentler and sadder. This is fantasy by way of malfunction.
The game-within-the-film unfolds in a strange mix of boggy fields, distant castles and 1980s cars, a dream quest running on corrupted childlike fantasies. The journey into OBEX can’t help but remind us of Alice In Wonderland, or The Never-ending Story, although with the runaway dog motif, the better comparisons might be The Wizard of Oz, or Labyrinth. But it offers thoughtful, melancholy minimalism instead of a grand adventure.
That undersells how fun it is, though, if you’re on its wavelength. The standout is Victor (Frank Mosley), a benevolent companion with a cathode-ray TV for a head, who tags along as Conor searches for Sandy – and maybe for the nerve to return to the real world. The idea that Conor’s closest companion is a television makes a perfect emotional sense. Yet when Mary (Callie Hernandez), the caring neighbour from real life, appears inside the game, it’s a reminder of what’s waiting beyond the screen, if he can face it.
Obex might be the strangest adventure of the year. The action is minimal; the tension lies not in whether Conor completes the quest, but in whether he can bring himself to keep playing. As the film gently prods at emotional stasis, some sequences meander. The pacing is certainly deliberate. But the ending is sincere and quietly moving.
Birney’s films are about lonely people navigating distorted internal landscapes. He works in the same tradition of emotionally wounded analogue surrealism as Computer Chess and I Saw the TV Glow, but he brings his own mixture of quietism and yearning to it. Obex might be his most complete work: a meditation on both 8-bit nostalgia and the competing importance of touching grass. It may seem smaller and simpler than Strawberry Mansion, but perhaps it’s just more focused. It’s also funnier, sweeter, and maybe even kinder. Recommended.
Obex played at the Fantasia International Film Festival
Whitlock&Pope 