OBEX
Directed by Albert Birney
Written by Albert Birney, Pete Ohs
Starring Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Paisley Isaacs, Frank Mosley, Dorothy
Running time 1 hour and 30 minutes
Currently unrated by the MPA
by "Doc" Hunter Bush, Staff Writer and Podcast Director
One of my favorite films from my time covering the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival was a weird little piece of brain candy that got stuck somewhere in my mind called Strawberry Mansion. A near-future dystopia film where an omniscient megacorpo has the ability to audit dreams in order to draw more taxes, Strawberry Mansion highlighted a distinct visual and tonal style, a strong sense of individuality, and a touching message about love, art, and the importance of living a life. It stayed with me--enough so that I picked up the physical release as soon as I could--and firmly put filmmakers Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley on the map for me.
OBEX comes once again from director Birney, going solo on this one, though he co-wrote it with Pete Ohs. Themes about the ephemeral nature of life, as well as a fondness for VHS tapes, a fantastical story, and a melancholic bittersweetness mark OBEX as coming from one of the minds behind Strawberry Mansion, but as with any auteur (or auteur in the making) what really delights me is where the films differ from each other. In contrast to the brightly-colored and thematically sweeping Strawberry Mansion, OBEX is shot in black and white and, despite a third act trip into a sword-and-sorcery fantasyland, feels very intimate.
Conor (Birney) lives a very solitary life in a small home in the year 1987. Aside from his beloved dog Sandy (played by Dorothy), and the occasional through-the-closed-door interactions with neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) who does his grocery shopping for him, Conor does not interact with anyone. He watches a three-high stack of era-appropriate TVs, and offers his services as an ASCII artist for $5 a pop via magazine ad: "I will draw you with my computer". It's while checking out his latest ad in Personal Computing magazine that he sees an ad for a computer game called OBEX. Via the U.S. mail, also conducted like a dead-drop, Conor exchanges $20 and a self-shot VHS audition tape for a personalized OBEX disk (or perhaps it's a diskette?).
Initially the game experience is a bit of a letdown: overly simplistic gameplay with confusing objectives and rules, though the main character sprite looks just like Conor and his trusty steed is named Sandy. But after becoming frustrated and throwing the diskette (I'm going with diskette, it's a nice, vintage word) in the trash, things start to become a bit hazy. Odd, potentially supernatural events begin unfolding in small ways at first, and largely without Conor seeming too concerned, but as time wears on, it seems like the demon IXAROTH, the game's antagonist, may be affecting the real world.
If this sounds a bit like Brainscan (1994, dir. John Flynn) that's because it is, though OBEX pays homage to the ur-text for movies where a demonic entity manipulates reality: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven). In NoES, Freddy Krueger is a visceral, vengeful creature acting out a punishment on the children of the townspeople who murdered him, while in Brainscan, The Trickster is a demon who obfuscates reality in pursuit of a more immersive gaming experience. IXAROTH falls somewhere in between these two in really interesting thematic ways.
[Spoilers to follow for both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Brainscan]
Despite numerous characters' disbelief that "this can't be happening" throughout the Nightmare franchise, it is happening. Freddy is a real threat, so much so that the franchise's seventh installment, Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994, dir. Wes Craven), moves up one level of the reality, bringing Freddy into "the real world" where previously, he had only been a character in films. Conversely, all of Brainscan's threats and dangers are ultimately revealed to be The Trickster living up to his name--though to be fair, there is a reality-breaking mid-credit stinger that's just... wonderfully, delightfully confusing.
As events unfold in OBEX, we are given snapshots into Conor's backstory and subconscious through a series of dreams where he is driving with his sick mother in the backseat, taunting and almost haunting him. It becomes clear that Conor's unstated agoraphobia--an anxiety disorder signified by feeling unsafe in certain, usually unfamiliar locations--may be a response to his grief. When IXAROTH invades his home, through Conor's stack of TVs, and kidnaps Sandy, he takes away Conor's only safe space and threatens his only real remaining connection to his life. It's on his ensuing quest to rescue Sandy that Conor will be forced to confront his past traumas, go well outside of his comfort zone, and even address some uncomfortable truths about his childhood that he seemingly wished to avoid thinking about.
The last aspect of OBEX that I wanted to address is the use of, in my eyes, heavily thematically-relevant cicada imagery. Conor's home is surrounded by them, with a lone bug even invading his space from time to time, and once he sets off on his grand quest, he encounters them as obstacles and enemies in service of Conor's demonic nemesis. We're familiar with butterflies as a metaphor for personal growth and rebirth and it's obvious why they are the more commonly-found imagery, but I think the frequent insert shots of cicadas molting included in OBEX are meant to represent the same thing. To Conor, they're undesirable because they represent the kind of difficult forward motion in his life that he is avoiding making. On top of that, their constant chittering acts as a metaphor for the constant noise of distraction modern life and technology allows us.
As a film, OBEX is at times unsettling, at times thrilling, but always fascinating and made with a deliberateness that's extremely confident and self-assured. You can enjoy it on multiple levels; the technical aspects of the filmmaking, the engrossing horror/adventure story, or the emotional core, and get quite a lot out of it, but if you leave with one takeaway, let it be this: Albert Birney is a filmmaker to watch.
