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Sundance Review: Save The Puppy Save The World With Albert Birney's Lo-Fi Fantastical 'OBEX'

By Jason Adams | Film | January 28, 2025 |

OBEX BIRNEY SUNDANCE.jpg
Image sources (in order of posting): Magnify, Fusion Entertainment,

There is no filling the yawning void that the loss of David Lynch has left behind—like Sarah Palmer removing her face in Twin Peaks: The Return to reveal oblivion itself we’re on the other side of the black abyss now; fully somewhere over the opposite of the rainbow. But there are a lot of younger filmmakers whose imaginations, clearly blasted in the cinematic furnaces Lynch built, have shown real surrealist promise. Under elder figureheads like Nicolas Winding Refn and Peter Strickland we have up-and-comers like Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please), Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink), Jennifer Reeder (Perpetrator), and Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the T.V. Glow).

And then there’s Baltimore native Albert Birney, whose sixth feature OBEX—a compellingly lo-fi straining of The Legend of Zelda through the black-and-white colander of Eraserhead—has just premiered at Sundance. Telling the strange, strange tale of the agoraphobic Conor Marsh (played by Birney himself) who’s been forced a la John Wick to venture into the terrifying world out of doors (and dimensions) in the name of his adorable wonder-dog Sandy, OBEX is a terrific and tactile achievement from the fresh-faced filmmaker. As uncanny as it is sweet, as funny as it is often creepy-as-fuck, OBEX proves Birney is one to keep following down the rabbit holes of his own making.

The year is 1987 and Conor spends his days and nights never leaving his comfortably claustrophobic one-story suburban home, walled in with TVs and computer screens and video-tapes of movies he’s recorded. Followed around every second under-foot by that perfect angel Sandy (played by Birney’s own dog Dorothy), why would he need to? And coming from one anxiety-case looking upon another, Birney makes a great case for a life lived hermetically sealed—this is not a movie that judges the isolated lifestyle, but revels in its possibilities. (Indeed one gets the feeling watching a movie this hand-crafted that Birney is a deeply committed member of the choir he’s preaching to.)

Conor makes his living by placing ads in computer magazines for ASCII portraits he pounds out—we watch him daily slide into a fugue state of finger-tapping, tracing photographs that arrive in his mailbox into dash and squiggle-based perfect copies. Then his food and supplies get delivered by a sweet neighbor named Mary (Callie Hernandez) who he speaks to only through his door, and he settles into the sofa where he and Sandy watch A Nightmare on Elm Street on their three-TVs-piled-high set-up. And if this ain’t the life then you tell me what is!

Unfortunately utopian bliss is never long for this world, and so fractures begin to erupt up through Conor’s perfect little set-up. Foremost it’s the moment of the cyclic 17-year cicada invasion, and all of the horrid little beasts seem to be coming up through the dirt in Conor’s miniscule yard. They’re on his windows; scuttling across his kitchen floor. And the soundscape Birney creates out of this, an unrelenting insect screeching mixing with the static of Conor’s many screens, is 100% Lynchian drone—a deeply unnerving wall of noise that others every waking moment. And that’s just the beginning.

Because one day while flipping through one of his computer magazines Conor sees an ad for a new video-game called OBEX that catches his eye—looks like fun, he helpfully narrates to Sandy, aka the world’s greatest dog of all time. Some time later the game cartridge he ordered shows up in the mail, and after finishing another one of his retro portraits he dives right in. The game proves simple—too simple, really. Until sure enough, in the ways of such things, the game spills out into the real world. Conor starts having visions of an odd skull-headed beast made of light roaming about. And before you know it poof, the most adorable most perfect puppy-dog creation this world has ever seen has disappeared into Conor’s computer screen, her computerized little yelps making for the most nightmarish sound ever crafted.

Naturally, as would any person who’s ever stared into that perfect puppy angel’s eyes would do, Conor suits up and dives right into the game to save the only thing that has ever mattered and ever will, Sandy our sweet Sandy. And from there Birney stages for us a silly scary quest through surreal hellscapes wedged somewhere between Oz and the Land of Nod—like reverse projections of faded photos, scratched and small and inky black, Conor wanders this bizarre never-never-land and faces down multiple foes, unraveling the mysteries of his own obsessions along the way to save his pup from digitized oblivion.

Whereas Birney’s previous Sundance-playing film (the terrific technicolor phantasmagoria Strawberry Mansion) felt like it was looking outward through the lens of his artisanal cinema, seeing a bigger world spun out from his personal silken stash, OBEX feels far more inward-looking. Burrowing down into the fried static of our brains, our collective fears wearing skeleton suits while clicking and clacking in night-time silhouette. Without needing to preach as such OBEX is clearly a story shaped by pandemic mindset—trapped in boxes within boxes and screens within screens, we must choose our own adventures. Choose them wisely. I’m just ecstatic that Birney took me—alongside that sweet angel Sandy—along for this one. Movies this particular, this personalized and hand-crafted, remain a rare gift.