OBEX: A Lo-Fi Sci-Fi Fever Dream About Digital Isolation

Albert Birney returns to Sundance after 2021's "Strawberry Mansion" with OBEX, a black-and-white meditation on screen addiction that feels like "Eraserhead" meets early Nintendo. Set in 1987 Baltimore but feeling timeless in its themes, this is experimental cinema that actually experiments – and mostly succeeds.

Birney plays Conor Marsh, a shut-in who hasn't left his house in years, making a living by recreating photographs using ASCII art on his Macintosh. When he starts playing a mysterious game called OBEX and his dog Sandy disappears, the line between reality and simulation dissolves. What follows is a hypnotic journey into analog horror and digital loneliness.

Shot in grainy monochrome that evokes both German Expressionism and bootleg VHS tapes, OBEX creates an immersive soundscape of buzzing CRT monitors, dot matrix printers, and droning synthesizers. The aesthetic is deliberately primitive – early Mac graphics, text-based adventures, screens within screens creating infinite regression.

The genius is how Birney uses obsolete technology to explore contemporary isolation. Conor's relationship with screens predicts our smartphone age, but the analog nature makes it feel both nostalgic and alien. When he ventures into the game world to find Sandy, accompanied by Vincent (Frank Mosley) who has a TV for a head, the film becomes a surreal quest through the subconscious of someone who's forgotten how to exist offline.

At 90 minutes, it occasionally drags, and the deliberately obtuse narrative will frustrate viewers expecting conventional storytelling. But there's something genuinely transporting about Birney's vision. This is "movie-video-art" that belongs equally in galleries and cinemas, using the language of early gaming to explore how we lose ourselves in synthetic worlds.

Oscilloscope Laboratories nabbed distribution rights, comparing it favorably to "I Saw the TV Glow." That's apt – both films use retro media to explore modern alienation. But where that film felt labored, OBEX achieves genuine transcendence through its commitment to its bizarre aesthetic. It's the kind of film that burrows into your subconscious and emerges days later when you hear cicadas or see static on a dead channel.