As mystifying and potentially alienating as an obscure online subculture, “OBEX,” an indie oddity by the writer-director Albert Birney, takes its name from the immersive video game that Conor (Birney) stumbles upon in a tech magazine — and promptly orders for himself.
The year is 1987 — well before our screens launched their world domination — yet Conor’s modest Baltimore home is already filled with gadgets: an early Mac for his gig rendering people’s photos into ASCII artworks (a retro graphic design technique consisting of keyboard characters); a trio of televisions and a massive stockpile of VHS tapes. Like a precursor to our modern generation’s reclusive tech-obsessives, gentle Conor is a shut-in whose only friend is his beloved dog Sandy, who becomes the perfect weapon for cracking open his small world.
In the first half of this black-and-white odyssey, Birney plunges us into Conor’s wholesome routine while teasing the coming dangers through visceral close-ups of the cicadas swarming around his home. Melding banal domestic images with grotesque and uncanny ones is a Lynchian enterprise, and Birney succeeds — at least on a technical level — at creating unease through vintage practical effects and a scratchy sound design.
When Conor’s mysterious new game sucks Sandy into its alternate reality, forcing him to play (and die at least once) in order to save her, the film sparkles with freak show originality, from stop-motion skeletons to humanoid cicadas. It’s enough to distract from an otherwise humdrum redemption epic with all the flat beats of analog gameplay. There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.
OBEX Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
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