Get Weird, Fight Demons, and Save the Dog in ‘OBEX’ [Sundance 2025 Review]
What are the things I’d do for my dog? Well, I’d certainly fight someone for her. I’d travel to the ends of the earth if it meant keeping her safe and okay. I’d spend a lot of money on a restricted diet because she has severe allergies (spoiler: I do). Would I go full Conor Marsh (Albert Birney) in his new feature OBEX, transporting myself into a low-fi virtual world to combat demons in locales endearingly named the Isle of Whispers and Valley of Chrono? Probably, even at the risk of the demon, Ixaroth eating my mortal soul.
Birney’s (Strawberry Mansion) latest feature is filmmaking as shades. Shades of David Lynch and Wes Craven merged with Birney’s own idiosyncratic Baltimore sensibilities. It’s always nice to see some hometown rep. Conor Marsh’s secluded life is pre-digital ennui. Cicadas acoustically torment him, crawling and clawing at trash bins and window frames, with Matt Giordano’s sound design augmenting every nasty, insectile detail. The decibels are set firmly on squeamish.
Mary (Blair Witch’s Callie Hernandez), first appearing exclusively off-screen, regularly drops groceries off for Conor as he dives into his early adopter hobby of printing human faces… on his computer. There’s money in there somewhere, I’m sure of it. However, there’s a quest to be completed, courtesy of the inexplicable floppy disc for the titular OBEX. This declaratively groundbreaking new computer game puts you (Conor) in the middle of the action. Even accessing the game comes with a kind of audition, the need to contort your body at all angles for the software to match your gait and movements appropriately.
The game arrives alongside some surreal sci-fi antics. Weird dreams and odd conversations are not unlike this year’s The Tenants, which are realistic enough to make some sense, though imprecisely, uncannily off, if just a tad. Oh, and old-school VHS recordings of A Nightmare on Elm Street. 1987 was sick. That darned demon might not be contained to just the game, and while Conor initially plans to dump the software, bored with its dated mechanics and broken gameplay, the theft of his dog, Sandy, in this virtual world, mandates he goes full Kazuto Kirigaya and dives into the game to save his best friend.
There’s hypnotism in new tech. OBEX draws its strongest thematic throughline in capturing the surreal allure of analog screens, pointedly comparing them to the isolating, perhaps dangerous digital technology we’re all too eager to get lost in today. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse doesn’t endure more than two decades later for nothing.
There are strong theoretical roots to OBEX’s fantastical fantasy world, namely the paradigm suggesting we treat computers as social actors—in other words, we treat them as people. OBEX features Victor (Frank Mosley), a talking television screen, and the glowing rendition of the grocery gal Mary. There are knights, frightening skeletons (whose jump scares admittedly got me once or twice), and amorphous static demons. They’re real but not quite a substitute for what’s out in the actual world.
All of it is rendered in a lovingly old-fashioned Sam Raimi style, whether the stop-motion ghouls or a sensational practical effect of skin spiraling off into the sky from a corpse. Better still, for as decidedly weird as OBEX intends to be, there’s a rational, coherent center to it all. Yes, there are demonic interludes and walking cicadas, though OBEX adheres to a pretty strict set of rules that grounds the thematic intent. We’re all lonely and looking for a way out. Some of us succumb to screens, some to service. The crackles of OBEX, its muffled imagery, are our subconscious—our desires—rendered virtually.
What’s actually happening? Why does Freddy Krueger cameo in the finale? Who knows. But what Birney has accomplished here is impressive nonetheless. Virtual or real, the world is quite strange, isn’t it? It doesn’t need to make sense. Sometimes, our motivation to get through the day might be as simple as saving our dog from the maws of a demon.
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OBEX
Summary
Obex wants you to fight demons and save your dog. Albert Birney’s feature is fantastical and weird enough to convince me to do just that.
