Albert Birney’s OBEX blends DIY effects with 1987 video‑game horror

OBEX, written, directed by and starring Albert Birney, is an indie horror‑science fiction film set in 1987 Baltimore about a reclusive technophile, Conor, who enters an immersive video game to try to rescue his beloved dog, Sandy.

The film places Conor in a gadget‑filled home — an early Macintosh he uses to render people’s photos into ASCII art, a trio of televisions and a large stockpile of VHS tapes — and plays out in black and white. In its first half Birney lingers on Conor’s routine while foreshadowing danger with visceral close‑ups of swarming cicadas; the reviewer described the film’s melding of banal domestic images with grotesque, uncanny ones as a Lynchian enterprise and said Birney succeeds on a technical level through vintage practical effects and a scratchy sound design.

When the mysterious game sucks Sandy into its alternate reality, Conor is forced to play — and dies at least once — to save her, and the film displays stop‑motion skeletons and humanoid cicadas. The reviewer wrote that those freak‑show elements lend originality but also distract from an otherwise humdrum redemption arc with flat beats of analog gameplay, and suggested that any deeper point about technology warping self‑perception may be debatable. OBEX is not rated, runs 1 hour 30 minutes and is in theaters.

Key Topics

Culture, Albert Birney, Obex, Baltimore, Sandy, Macintosh