Albert Birney writes, directs and stars in OBEX, a defiantly low-budget, fiercely independent film that pays affectionate homage to 1990s video games. Think the era of dot-matrix printers humming in back bedrooms and graphics that were more suggestion than spectacle. There’s a handmade quality to the whole enterprise, as though it has been coded together on an ageing desktop and then left to flicker into life on screen.
With one eye on horror (though mercifully without the gore ) Birney conjures a surreal landscape that feels like a particularly fruitful collaboration between Douglas Adams and David Lynch. The absurd rubs up against the ominous; the mundane tips quietly into the uncanny. It’s playful, but there’s an undercurrent of dread, as if something is glitching just beneath the surface.
OBEX places Conor inside a gaming world when his dog, Sandy, disappears, and he must quite literally follow her into the machine. His guides are as strange as the terrain itself: a flickering avatar who appears only intermittently, and a talkative fellow with an old-style television for a head – a figure both comic and faintly menacing. The quest narrative is simple enough, yet the film treats it less as a straight line and more as a looping circuit board, doubling back on itself and fragmenting as it goes.
Shot entirely in black and white, the film is at once unsettling and oddly nostalgic. The absence of colour sharpens its textures: pixels seem harsher, shadows deeper, faces more mask-like. Birney offers a host of locations, both within the game and in the so-called real world, though the border between the two steadily erodes. As Conor progresses, he is not merely navigating gameplay but being absorbed by it, his identity dissolving into static and geometry.
It isn’t absolutely essential to keep track of every plot development. Indeed, attempting to do so may be beside the point. Viewers will either tune in swiftly and wholeheartedly to OBEX’s wavelength, accepting its dream logic, or find themselves somewhat exasperated by its refusal to explain itself. The film seems content to hover in ambiguity, daring the audience to surrender rather than decode.
Callie Hernandez is suitably spooky as Mary, her presence pitched somewhere between guardian and spectre, while Frank Mosley’s Victor exudes cynicism and threat through the smallest shifts in posture and movement. Yet this remains very much Birney’s playground. It’s completely his aesthetic, his rhythms, his peculiar storytelling instincts. The performances orbit his vision rather than compete with it.
The film poses an intriguingly retro question: what if we could have stepped into the screen in the days of rudimentary graphics and whirring processors? When personal computing was still edging towards the mainstream, when the virtual felt experimental rather than inevitable, was there a porous boundary between fantasy and reality just waiting to be crossed? OBEX toys with that notion, not in the sleek, hyper-digital manner of contemporary sci-fi, but through analogue textures and deliberate crudeness.
What, ultimately, is OBEX telling us? Does it matter if we can’t quite articulate it? The film seems less concerned with delivering a tidy message than with evoking a mood, a half-remembered technological adolescence tinged with anxiety and wonder. This is my first exposure to Birney’s work, and I find myself admiring its analogue design, its quirky invention, and its willingness to remain strange. Whether anything concrete actually happens feels secondary to the sheer production flair and creative energy on display.
Lightbulb Film Distribution is pleased to announce that OBEX will be released in the UK & Ireland from 9th March. The film will have its UK Premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival on 2nd March.