'Obex' Review
- Josh Davis
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Release Date: 01/09/26 [Cinemas]
Genre: Horror. SciFi.
MPAA: Not Rated.
Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories.
The Verdict: A Maybe
Obex is the kind of “film” most people would watch in college with a few friends and, allegedly, a few illicit substances.
Albert Birney directs, co-writes (with Pete Ohs), and stars as Conor, a 36-year-old man who lives alone with his dog, Sandy, in a sad, solitary life spent largely behind a screen. By day, he creates primitive, text-based computer drawings of people for a meager sum. His groceries are delivered and left on the porch by a woman named Mary (Callie Hernandez) who never stops to talk or comes inside. Computers fill every room, playing movies, news, favorite music – even white noise to sleep by. It’s essentially an average modern life, if a slightly agoraphobic one.
When Conor sees an ad for a new game called OBEX that promises to place players literally inside the game, he records a video audition, sends it in, and waits. A floppy disk arrives. He pops it in. Strange things start to happen. Eventually, Conor quite literally finds himself inside the game, embarking on a creepy, perilous journey to rescue his beloved dog.
If the premise weren’t strange enough, the film is shot in stark black and white, its visual language as deliberately lo-fi as its tube monitors, dot-matrix printer, and buzzing CRT screens. Pixelated phantoms drift in and out of the frame as if seeping through the screen itself. The sound design snaps, crackles, and pops like an eight-bit Nintendo cartridge nearing its last breath.
The best thing about the film is Birney’s lead performance. He’s essentially alone for much of the runtime, aside from the occasional apparition of his mother and Hernandez’s Mary, who reappears as a helpful shopkeeper once Conor enters OBEX. The editing also deserves credit, weaving in just enough analog and early-computer charm to keep things mildly compelling.
Still, Obex is often too damned weird for its own good. There is a message here – a demon inside the game tells Conor, “Some day we’ll all live on computers because life outside is too sad.” For a pixel monster seemingly pulled from 1987, that’s eerily prophetic.
But the film itself is too slight to be transcendent, too lo-fi to be transportive in the way something like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World manages, and stuck somewhere between silly and creepy, with neither mode fully paying off.
There may be something here for fans of handmade craft – or for viewers who’ve run out of David Lynch films or pirated NES ROMs on their PCs. Or for those who actually are in college, with a few friends, and, allegedly, a few illicit substances.
One could do worse than popping in Obex. But one could also do far better.