A palpable air of nervous anticipation hangs over OBEX. It’s 1987; the Cold War is reaching its end and the internet age looms, full of promise both of possibility and of danger. For the agoraphobic “Computer” Conor Marsh (Albert Birney, who also writes, directs and edits), a connection to the outside world is only feasible through his early-age Macintosh and an incessant stream of news and cable-aired films. Secluded yet content, Conor restlessly waits for the world to catch up with the digital age — until, one day, he and his dog Sandy get caught inside the titular computer game. All inside a flimsy floppy disk. Birney, whose Strawberry Mansion equally employed surrealist imagery, here goes for something much more subdued in both tone and visual aesthetic. If David Lynch is the obvious parallel point for the iconoclastic filmmaker, then Eraserhead is OBEX’s slightly less paranoid cousin. The strangest thing here may just be how unperturbed Conor is by the strange goings-on in his tiny Baltimore home, a reflection, perhaps, of just how plugged in the coder is to a virtual space that is still in its liminal nascence.

Shot by co-writer Pete Ohs in black and white with a consistent shallow depth of field, OBEX quickly immerses us in Conor’s peculiar setup. Seemingly, Conor’s only companion is Sandy, a small terrier that he had mysteriously found on his doorstep. The only human Conor seems to interact with is his neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez), who fetches his groceries for him and speaks to him solely through his front door. Conor’s profession begs credulity, not so much for what it is but for how little he gets paid to do it: for only $5, he will digitize a portrait of your loved one, which is to say that he uses black keys on white paper to draw a picture with letters, numbers and symbols as his only tools. Other than that, the 36 year-old Conor doesn’t do much. He seems happy, with the only real bother being the swarm of cicadas providing a strange, high-pitched soundtrack to his every waking moment. On three stacked televisions, he catches horror flicks like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th on free cable and the nightly news, all of which he records for posterity and adds to his massive wall of VHS tapes, records and CDs. At night, he serenades his dog to bed with lo-fi karaoke tracks or else crude sleep sounds like ocean waves. Two things threaten Conor’s carefully curated world. One, Mary is on the cusp of taking a new job which will require her to move, thus necessitating a new grocery buyer. Two, the game OBEX, which is advertised in the same computer magazine where Conor has posted his own services. “Using state of the art technology, we insert you into the game,” the ad promises, so long as you can film yourself answering a short set of normal seeming questions and can send twenty bucks to the manufacturer. When the game comes, it seems like a total bust. There’s not much to do in the game; they have put Conor’s face in the game, but it’s pixelated and poorly animated. Conor discards the game, but it seems the game isn’t done with him: soon, a luminous, horned creature is stalking the house and the swarm of cicadas outside seem to balloon in number. Then, Conor wakes up to find Sandy has been abducted into the game, and he must follow to retrieve her. Birney’s work here and elsewhere is far too linear to be truly comparable to Lynch, but there is a definite kinship, especially regarding the balance of unnerving images and black, ironic comedy. Conor’s printer suddenly spits out a long paper with the terrifying words “REMOVE YOUR SKIN” repeated like Jack’s manuscript in The Shining, but then there will also be a scene where he has a mini panic attack about his cheddar being white and not orange. Later, after a run-in with a computer-headed stranger, the film morphs into a bizarre hero’s journey, and he comes across a bloodied naked woman in an open field at night.

Perhaps more relevant a comparison point is the experimental visionary Maya Deren, whose dream-logic style relied on associative edits to create her unique atmosphere. Watching OBEX is a rare treat, most successful as hapic gaming recreation, perhaps ironically, when it isn’t in the game but within Conor’s oddball, isolated world. It may be not the most exciting game to be immersed in, but inside Conor’s bedroom, where he sings Gary Numan’s Cars before nodding off, the dangers of the world, demonic or otherwise, seem far, far away.
OBEX releases theatrically on January 9th, 2026.

Release Date

January 25, 2025

Runtime

90 minutes

Director

Albert Birney

Writers

Albert Birney, Pete Ohs

Producers

James Belfer, Todd Remis, Adam Belfer, Kyra Nicole Rogers