Obex

Old Nerds, Lost Worlds: The Retro Dread of OBEX Dissects Our Screen-Sick Souls

“Obex” (2025), Albert Birney’s latest, is less a film in the traditional sense than a mesmeric, multimedia experience—an immersive hallucination that catapults us into a nostalgic yet unsettling reimagining of 1987 Baltimore.

It evokes the aesthetic of early home-computer video games—a love letter to a forgotten digital past and to the global legion of ‘old nerds’ who once lived inside pixelated universes.

With stark black-and-white cinematography—at times evocative of “Eraserhead”—and lo-fi visual textures reminiscent of Space Invaders and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Birneyconcocts a hypnotic blend of analog dread and digital dreaming.

The horror-adjacent quality lingers with eeriness, disquiet, paranoia, and technological hauntings, using experimental editing techniques, retro video game tricks and typical 1980s special effects.

Especially near the end, when a cascade of skulls appears onscreen—a moment that distills the essence of ‘80s zombie comedy-horror and indie horror games alike.

The plot, if one can call it that, is deceptively simple: Conor Marsh, a withdrawn loner, ekes out a living by “redrawing” photographs on his Macintosh using typographic symbols.

He hasn’t left his home in years, relying on his neighbour Mary (played with quiet empathy by Callie Hernandez) to fetch his groceries. But Conor’s self-imposed solitude is shattered when he loads a mysterious game called OBEX.

After his beloved dog Sandy disappears, the lines between reality and gameplay begin to dissolve, drawing Conor into the bizarre inner world of OBEX—a retro-futuristic realm where the surreal logic of old-school video games takes hold.

But as with most of Birney’s work, plot is merely scaffolding. “Obex” defies classification. It is, at its core, what one might call “movie-video-art”—an audiovisual artefact as much at home in a gallery installation as it is in a cinema.

Viewers may find themselves hypnotised, as though standing inside a looping museum piece that mutates with each glance.

The film is anchored in a singular thematic concern: alienation. This ingenious fantasy explores the emotional hazards of finding comfort in screens while avoiding real human connection.

Whether glued to his monitor or the eerie vertical TV totem that dominates his living room, Conor is in a constant state of retreat—seeking solace from the messiness of life through synthetic distraction.

Birney presents an idiosyncratic vision of a life swallowed by media. There’s a disturbing undercurrent here—a lamentation for a society that fetishises its own digital decay.

The film doesn’t just comment on smartphones or the internet per se, but rather on their capacity to fracture time, distort intimacy, and create portals into existential voids.

“Obex” bears thematic kinship with Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), though I’d argue Birney’s effort is far more cohesive and affecting.

Both films are entrancing and deeply personal works, warning of the psychic toll media addiction can take.

Yet the film suggests a glimmer of hope—not in chasing emotional fulfilment through digital proxies, but in confronting the analog world we’ve left behind.

“Obex” doesn’t just invite us to play—it dares us to unplug. In a culture drowning in feedback loops and curated selves, Birney suggests the ultimate rebellion may be returning to the real.

WATCHED AT:

NIFF 2025