If you’re a computer-age citizen who’s old enough to remember those benchmarks of pre-internet adjustment, when personal computing went from toy hobby to addictive portal to worrisomely ubiquitous companion, then “Obex” is the lo-fi retro-horror fantasy for you.
Albert Birney, the director, co-writer and star, delivers a black-and-white ode to a previous era’s slippery boundaries between real existence and the 8-bit kind that isn’t quite a cautionary tale, nor does it want to be one. Rather, it’s a piece of old-tech nostalgia made with Lynchian invention, sweetness and disturbance. “Obex” is wonderfully idiosyncratic about the dawn of screen obsession, understanding both its promise and peril.
It’s 1987 and 30-something Baltimore shut-in Conor (Birney, looking like an “Office Space” reject) has carved out a contentedly isolated existence playing games on his boxy Mac, watching television on three stacked VCR-connected sets like some indoor totem and caring for his dog, Sandy. A knock on the front door means kind-voiced Mary (Callie Hernandez) has arrived with his weekly grocery delivery, but that portal usually stays closed until she’s gone. The summer’s unpleasant cicada infestation, meanwhile, is a stark reminder that his preferred droning screech comes from his dot-matrix printer, spitting out keyboard-symbol drawings he makes for customers who send him cash.
Alongside his ad for those services in the PC-themed magazine, however, is a page touting a new interactive game called Obex that guarantees to “put you inside” it. (Whoa.) From a mailed-in audition video, Conor receives a floppy disk that offers up a rendering of him in jerky graphics alongside a castle, horse and sword, calling upon him to defeat the hairy, horned demon Ixaroth before being eaten. That night his usual vaguely creepy mom dream (she’s in the backseat while he drives in darkness) is disturbed by the sound of the printer running by itself, creating pages repeating the phrase “Remove Your Skin.”
Conor soon learns what entering the game really means when his dog disappears and rescuing her means total immersion into the fantasy realm of Obex, a mapped land of maidens, elixirs, knights, skeletal baddies and that dreaded demon king. This being a resourceful micro-indie, however, what we encounter visually is a quaintly augmented countryside, unassuming costumes and charmingly rough, old-school special effects (burns, glows) that you’d now have to call artisanal.
And yet what’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside. The quest comes with dangers and consequences but also seeds Conor’s socialization, albeit with a figure named Victor (Frank Mosley) with a TV for a head whose idea of heaven is … getting to watch people. That makes sense, no?
The two halves of “Obex” are ostensibly the real and the simulated, but what if they also represent a more nuanced view of humanity: self-made seclusion versus a digital dominion that proposes engagement with the world? Just because that relationship doesn’t work out for everybody (to put it mildly) doesn’t mean, in an earlier time, it was entirely malevolent.
But Birney isn’t naive. His gently oddball vision of loner heroics has plenty of terror-steeped imagery to go with the referential sound design’s aural innocence of antiquated bloops, blurps and synthetic tones. “Obex” also reminds us that the power to be positively emboldened by tech — rather than imprisoned by it — always will be in humans’ hands, so long as we remember that we always can unplug.
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