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In an era where video game movies usually chase blockbuster spectacle, OBEX heads defiantly in the opposite direction. Written, directed by, and starring Albert Birney, the film is a surreal, low-fi fantasy that feels less like a conventional adventure and more like a fever dream about loneliness, digital escapism, and the strange places our minds wander when reality becomes unbearable.

Fans of Birney’s earlier cult oddity Strawberry Mansion will recognize the sensibility immediately: handmade visuals, melancholy humour, and a fascination with the porous boundary between imagination and waking life.

A Quest That Begins With Loss

Birney plays Conor, a thirty-something recluse whose existence is almost entirely mediated through a computer screen. His two anchors are video games and his beloved dog Sandy. When Sandy mysteriously disappears, the loss shatters the fragile routine that defines Conor’s life. His search leads him somewhere unexpected — into the very game he has been obsessively playing.

The titular game, OBEX, becomes both portal and psychological mirror. To rescue Sandy, Conor must traverse its strange landscapes and confront a demon named Ixaroth, but the journey is less about heroic triumph than existential unraveling.

Like many of the film’s most effective moments, the premise works metaphorically: the game world is not merely a fantasy environment but a projection of Conor’s inner life.

Early Lynchian Echoes

There’s an unmistakably David Lynch-adjacent energy to the film’s tone — particularly the director’s early work, where narrative coherence often gives way to texture and mood. OBEX embraces dream logic. Scenes drift in and out of one another. Dialogue occasionally feels like fragments of a half-remembered conversation. Objects carry an eerie symbolic weight.

The aesthetic reinforces this atmosphere. Birney favours tactile, lo-fi visual effects and handmade set pieces that feel closer to experimental art installation than mainstream fantasy cinema. The game environments have the uncanny texture of forgotten 1990s PC graphics filtered through a surrealist lens.

Rather than striving for realism, OBEX leans into artificiality — and in doing so creates something oddly hypnotic.

Gamification as Psychological Descent

Where OBEX becomes particularly interesting is in its use of gaming mechanics as narrative structure. Levels, quests, and encounters mirror Conor’s emotional state. Progression through the game doesn’t feel triumphant; it feels obsessive, as if he’s spiraling deeper into a digital labyrinth.

This gamified framework also becomes commentary on escapism. Conor retreats into OBEX not just to save Sandy but to avoid confronting the emptiness of his real life. The deeper he goes, the less clear the boundaries between player and character become.

The film never fully explains the metaphysics of its world — wisely so. OBEX functions best when experienced as a symbolic landscape rather than a literal one.

Sound, Texture and Handmade Weirdness

Adding to the film’s dreamlike texture is its score, recorded by Josh Dibb, founding member of Animal Collective. The music drifts between ambient melancholy and eerie electronic pulses, giving the film a sonic identity that feels both nostalgic and otherworldly.

Combined with Birney’s deliberately rough visual style, the soundtrack enhances the sensation that OBEX exists somewhere between retro gaming nostalgia and avant-garde fantasy.

A Strange but Compelling Indie Journey

OBEX won’t be for everyone. Its narrative can feel deliberately opaque, and viewers expecting a traditional fantasy adventure may find themselves disoriented by its meandering dream logic. Yet that same refusal to conform is also its greatest strength.

Birney has crafted something personal, odd, and unmistakably independent — a film that feels like it emerged from the margins of cinema rather than its mainstream centre.

OBEX stands as an intriguing curiosity: a surreal digital odyssey that captures the strange emotional gravity of games, memory, and loneliness.

And like any good quest, it leaves you wondering whether the real journey happened inside the screen — or inside the player.

  • Saul Muerte