It's easy to fall into the floppy-disk Oz of the charming lo-fi sci-fi OBEX

Strawberry Mansion's Albert Birney enters a video game fantasy, where escapism and nostalgia become a DIY nightmare.

By Jacob Oller | January 6, 2026 | 12:00pm

Photo: Oscilloscope

Film Reviews Albert Birney

It's easy to fall into the floppy-disk Oz of the charming lo-fi sci-fi OBEX

One of Sundance’s kookier offerings last year featured a new creative team-up from Strawberry Mansion co-director Albert Birney: OBEX. Where the former film (a collaboration with Kentucker Audley) was a colorful analog imagining of a corporatized future where dreams are recorded and taxed by the government, OBEX (co-written, shot, and co-edited by another indie staple, Erupcja‘s Pete Ohs) is a black-and-white sci-fi firmly entrenched in the fantasies and reality of the 1980s.

There, Conor Marsh (Birney), a shut-in ASCII artist with a loving little pooch named Sandy and a home devoted to TV screens and computer monitors, muddles through a slight existence on the fringes of society. There’s a reason he’s made a career of laboriously translating images of flesh and blood into ornate computer typography. The outside is scary, unknown—a soundscape composed of locust drones and the suspiciously cheery voice of the neighbor who drops off his groceries (Callie Hernandez) remind the audience that it’s better inside, where you have some control over what you see and hear. Especially if you have walls and walls of VHS tapes, as Conor does, and a karaoke machine that allows you to sing yourself to sleep with a synthy Gary Numan lullaby. But when Conor lets in something beyond his control, a cutting-edge video game that promises to literally put him in the game—a floppy-disk version of a premise that so many terrible video game-focused films have made into a punchline—his unconscious fears manifest digitally.

With a title that alludes to both a communication protocol and the point where our brainstem connects to the spinal cord, OBEX is all about shifting states and the things found in translation. Though the initially quiet and clever film heavily name-checks A Nightmare On Elm Street (and certainly owes a debt to Birney’s time making both the film and point-and-click game Tux And Fanny), OBEX also—like Strawberry Mansion—takes plenty of its wonder from The Wizard Of Oz. Transplanting that film’s dreamy “and you were there!” psychology to the fantasy world of an old-school fantasy RPG, OBEX eventually abandons its effective small-scale worldbuilding in favor of a more ambitious, rambling journey.

After going through a delightfully lo-fi scanning process that adds a little charm to the Hollywood boogeyman of CGI body captures, Conor gets his custom version of OBEX. But after dipping a toe into the game, he realizes he must rescue his little dog too (fittingly played by a pooch named Dorothy), which means diving all the way in, traversing the game world, and beating the boss at its end. In Birney’s gangly, unassuming, and—yes—childlike adventurer, there is a bit of light pastiche made of the simplicity of the arrangement. Not much in life is as linear as a nostalgic game’s path, few strangers are as purely welcoming as Conor’s in-game companions (including a scene-stealing living TV played by Frank Moseley), and our memories are never as complex as the events they imperfectly retain. There is a softball reckoning with our personally idealized pasts in here, hiding behind the lighting tricks and Spirit Halloween skeletons. As OBEX blurs between bittersweetness and surreality on its way to the final showdown, each new oddball encounter attempts to pierce Conor’s clearly escapist bubble.

This blend of genres, aesthetics, realities, and virtual realities doesn’t all add up—or adds up a bit too neatly, as the script makes Conor’s hazy backstory unmistakably clear—but OBEX is still endearingly contained, passionately executed, and impressively unique. The horrors when the physical and computational crash into one another are as affecting and disconcerting as Freddy Krueger’s bloody hauntings, while Conor’s offbeat and lonesome tech obsession makes his quiet, isolated life poignantly modern. (Some of these same themes, more directly tied to life at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, suffuse Tux And Fanny.) The trip can be awkward and methodical at times, but it’s easy to see enough of yourself along the way that you might get sucked in.

Director: Albert Birney
Writer: Albert Birney, Pete Ohs
Starring: Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Frank Mosley
Release Date: January 9, 2026

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