‘OBEX’ Review: ‘Eraserhead’ Meets ‘The Legend of Zelda’ in a Black-and-White, Cicada-Plagued Sci-Fi Trip
A kite shaped like a horse, a cicada-filled Baltimore world, and a black-and-white aesthetic almost perversely hooked on its own disaffected weirdness — writer/director Albert Birney’s “OBEX” is a surreal, early-’90s’-esque odyssey into its main character’s (also played by Birney) addiction to his vintage Mac and inability to form actual human connections. With the lo-fi scrappiness of a dot matrix printer and the hallucinatory male-specific anxiety of David Lynch‘s “Eraserhead,” “OBEX” tells the story of an awkward-under-his-skin computer programmer named Conor who escapes dreary black-and-white Baltimore into a fantasy world to defeat a demon named Ixaroth.
Birney, who previously co-directed the sci-fi adventure rom-com “Strawberry Mansion” with Kentucker Audley, writes, directs and stars in the movie as Conor Marsh. Living alone with his dog Sandy, he makes custom dot matrix printer photo reproductions for money over the post, while a neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) brings food delivery and some conversation through the door. Other than that, his flimsy grasp at human connection pretty much stops right there.
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Opportunity knocks, though, when an ad from Concatix Software offers a video game that supposedly allows the player to insert themselves in it. An invitation arrives, inviting him to “remove your skin.” Meanwhile, the Baltimore around him doesn’t feel that hospitable anymore anyway. Conor’s encounter with the program pulls him into a fantasy land that feels straight out of “The Legend of Zelda” as his dog goes missing, and he wends himself through a mystical other world. Conor’s reclusive self is now replaced by a questing self — one that involves pushing a lot of the fear of other people and new experiences aside, perhaps opening himself up more closely to the world back at home.
FIlmed in monochromatic black-and-white and set in a pre-internet 1987 with analog technology craftily rendered to suit the period, “OBEX” already feels primed for midnight movie status. Cinematographer Pete Ohs and composer Josh Dibb construct an almost soothingly eerie world, guided by Conor’s (and ergo Birney’s) off-kilter charm. Amusingly, Conor teams up with Frank Mosely as Victor, a guy with an ’80s TV set for a head and human body parts everywhere else. These elements sound twee on paper but actually work to color Birney and his team’s world with even more specific and often lovely oddball imagery than its already weird premise promised. Meanwhile, the drone of synths and cicadas create a threatening environment from the start, while suggesting the possibility that maybe this is all just an extension of Conor’s introverted psyche.
“OBEX” is essentially a series of each-more-bizarre-than-the-next set pieces that conjure not only our own baked-in nostalgia for the ’80s but the movies that informed what the ’80s-nostalgic aesthetic is at all (hence “Eraserhead,” which came out in the late 1970s but proved as influential as anything that followed it). The droll humor and kitschy production design aren’t going to work for every human on the planet, but why should they? And another question the movie is perhaps asking: Why are we so nostalgic for an analog world? Because life is too contemporary, and life has gotten too technologically complicated. “OBEX” is a warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.
Grade: B+
“OBEX” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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