OBEX Review: A Very Eighties-Coded Oddity

It’s 1987 in Baltimore, Maryland. A Nightmare on Elm Street is about to make its broadcast debut, George Bush Sr. is running for president, the country is in the buzzing depths of a 17-year cicada cycle, and digitizing an image means sending a photo to someone like Computer Conor, who’ll then convert it by hand into an ASCII image and print it on his dot matrix printer to mail back to you. And we mean real mail.

If these words mean nothing to you, then you may not be the target audience for OBEX, the latest from Strawberry Mansion co-director and Tux and Fanny co-creator Albert Birney. A devotee of analog filmmaking, his excursion in the digital world is a determined throwback that will cause painful pangs of recognition in anyone old enough to remember 8-bit being state of the art, not an artistic statement.

Conor’s the epitome of the 1980s nerd: not the modern tech bro faux jock, or the post-The Big Bang Theory wisecracking geek, but a socially dysfunctional shut-in with relationship issues. As played with sad-eyed restraint by director/co-writer Birney, his sources of joy are his dog, Sandy (Dorothy), and playing video games. Sadly, those games are getting samey, so he’s lightly thrilled by the possibilities of OBEX, a new game advertised in the back of Personal Computing magazine. Again, if you’re of a certain age, the joy on his face when it arrives on a floppy disc will cause a painful sense of recognition, especially when he realizes this game that promises to put you in the action, well, sucks.

If Birney’s channeling Eighties computer culture for his story (co-written with cinematographer Pete Ohs) – and doing so with disturbing and somewhat merciless accuracy – then his cinematic inspirations are from a decade or so later: the wave of black-and-white indies of the mid-Nineties and early 2000s, like Cory McAbee’s seminal yet underrated The American Astronaut. It’s that unmistakable silvery sheen that pulls OBEX back in time, that almost languorous pacing, the anti-structure and emphasis on a unified sensation rather than a script-driven narrative, that ties it to the more experimental adventures of that era.

That pacing is OBEX’s biggest demand. Or rather, it’s a prerequisite. If you’re not in tune with Birney’s deliberately mannered style of storytelling, OBEX will likely leave you cold. Most of the first hour is a character study of Conor in his dysfunction and isolation, surrounded by his VHS tapes and communicating only with the memory of his dead mother (Paisley Isaacs) and Mary (Callie Hernandez, The Endless, Jethica), the unseen woman on the other side of his front door who delivers his groceries. It’s in the second half  that the film develops a more charming, if bittersweet, tone: This is when a befuddled Conor falls into the video game in pursuit of Sandy, who has been captured by the game’s antagonist, the demon Ixaroth, and is pulled into the mythical land of Obex.

Here is the dynamic and gentleness of old text adventure games, complete with an in-joke about solving a combination lock that will resonate with old-school gamers. In these scenes, Birney entrancingly smooths the rough edges between Conor’s claustrophobic reality and the pastoral yet dangerous fantasy of Obex.

The film’s idiosyncrasies are definitely not for everyone, even those with a taste for obtuse indie flicks. It’s not got the scathing humor and endless wit of Ben Wheatley’s similarly retro Bulk, and, unlike Toby Jones’ comparably quirky AJ Goes to the Dog Park, it lacks a truly engaging protagonist. However, that’s the point: OBEX is about Conor’s growth as a person, and if he was already rounded and grounded then it wouldn’t be telling the story that Birney clearly wants to tell. Its gentleness and incremental increases in weirdness are a feature, not a bug.

This article appears in January 30 • 2026.