The American indie director Albert Birney has had a prolific career in the last few years. He is releasing his sixth feature film, OBEX. Birney released before Strawberry Mansion, Tux and Fanny, Sylvio, Eyeballs in the Darkness, and The Beast Pageant. The director uses the 1980s setting to tell his story, especially at the beginning of the domestic computer era. Conor (Birney) is an artist who draws people’s pictures on his Macintosh, prints them, and sends them. He works at his comfortable home, where he has a steady routine: eating cereal, getting the groceries from his neighbour Mary (Callie Hernandez), playing with his dog Sandy, watching the news on TV, and playing 8-bit games before bed. Conor is practically a hermit; a traumatic event makes him avoid going out of his home. When he sees an advertisement in a technology magazine about an immersive game called OBEX, he tapes a video and sends it to them. After receiving the personalized disc, things get weird, and Sandy goes missing. Conor is obliged to encounter his traumas and rescue her.
OBEX is an indie film about the love for video games. It is the director’s ode to 8-bit RPGs, a specific type of game of the beginning of the media’s popularization. In this sense, Birney takes his time to develop his character’s personality, establishing a sense of routine and understanding of his habits. He takes fifty minutes to move for the adventurous part of it, the crossover between reality and the 8-bit fiction world. Therefore, we comprehend who Conor is as an individual. He is a methodical man who closed himself into a routine due to traumatic events, which appear through flashbacks in his dreams. Conor became a self-isolated person because of the events with his mother, an abusive woman, whose cigarette’s smell got imprinted in his mind.
Furthermore, Sandy symbolizes comfort and the remembrance of the external world for him. The slow-paced introduction assigns the importance of the dog in his life and how her sudden appearance in his backyard seems like a gift from the universe. Thus, he has a moral duty to face his traumas to save her from the unknown land of OBEX. His version in that reality clashes with his real one. The virtual Conor is brave, drinks potions to enhance his abilities, and drives his mother’s car to rescue Sandy, trapped in a castle. There is an evident change in tones between the two halves of this narrative, with the first half being a more reflective study of the daily life of an ordinary person. The second is his physical and moral confrontation of his fears, insecurities, and unfamiliar nature. In the two different parts of the story, they center on Conor and how his past and the present influence who he is. The film is entirely about the events that influence his behavior and life.
Nevertheless, the film’s smaller scale does not prevent it from delivering a compelling visual construction. The few scenarios of the film, such as the forest, the house, and the castle, allow the art department to construct detailed sets. Likewise, there are fascinating creative choices to utilize the film’s small budget, such as using a church as the castle set and providing it a Gothic look, a darker, and dangerous space. It feels like the last phase of a game, the final fight against the boss to rescue someone important. Sandy is the one here. In the same sense, the Black and White cinematography by Pete Ohs aims to capture a nostalgic essence in film. However, the digital upbringing of his work achieves an emulating effect rather than reaching a 1980s visual, merging with the 8-bit graphical inserts. Technically, the cinematography is operational to the storytelling, but it is a distracting element due to its lack of contrast and darker scenes in different scenes.
Ultimately, OBEX is a homage to the early video games at the beginning of their popularization and spread into popular culture. Divided into two halves, Albert Birney’s film works better when it studies the routine and the fears of this ordinary man. When he shifts to the adventure, it is not as efficient, as it spends time explaining his trauma, and it has to rush to conclude its rescue mission. Nevertheless, it has a compelling world-building and references to an almost forgotten era, the times when computers and video games were not as widespread as they are now. In the end, it is similar to the games where a few phases are easy to enjoy, but the final one is not so much.
OBEX recently played at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official Fantasia site for the title.
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