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DIRECTED BY: Albert Birney
FEATURING: Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Frank Mosley
PLOT: Conor, a gentle shut-in, must navigate the dangerous world of a computer game when it kidnaps his dog.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Strange cicadan adversaries, point-and-click logic, and a celebratory eccentricity make OBEX an obvious odd-ball. Bonus points for being wholesome in its weirdness.
COMMENTS: 1987 was a year for cicadas. Billions of them globally, and who knows how many thousands emerging from their slumber to provide Baltimore a whirring, chirping Summer soundtrack. Reason enough to stay indoors—though left to his own device, Conor would do so anyway: he is a shut-in. For reasons only hinted at during Albert Birney’s low-key adventure film, OBEX, Conor only leaves his property when his dog Sandy is stolen by the the demon Ixaroth and spirited away to the mysterious land of Obex.
“Spirited away” may not be the correct phrase. Birney’s film exists at a strange intersection between (period) technology and classical fantasy, and Sandy’s plight is revealed through the monitor of ye olde Macintosh computer. Conor’s life, quiet and regular, relies on (then) state of the art home computers. His income is earned via text art portraits—lines and lines of punctuation forming a Pointalist-style image—and he ends the day with one or more machines running with midi-ambient or midi-karaoke music before bedtime. He lives alone with his dog, and his computers, and his stack of three cathode-ray televisions which, except on movie nights, all play different channels in the background. And every night he dreams about aimlessly driving his deceased mother in her old car.
The coziness of Conor’s space couldn’t be more different than the vast fields and forests of Obex, which our determined hero explores in the film’s second half. He encounters human-sized bug monsters, a kindly shopkeeper (a hold-over from his corporeal life, Maria, who does Conor’s grocery shopping every Wednesday), and makes a new friend out of an old one: an RCA Victor Model 14S774G—but call him “Victor.” His travels with Victor bring him to an automobile incongruously parked in the middle of an open stretch of greenery, its keys tucked in the visor, just like where Conor’s mother stored them. Other connections connect as well, and while we’re fairly sure we’re in the benighted land of Obex, we are almost certainly somewhere more allegorical as well.
From his small home to the wilds of Obex and into the heart of Ixaroth’s nightmare realm, Birney recounts Conor’s Quest (complete with a hat lifted, I swear, from King’s Quest) with heart, flourish, and more than a few sound-and-sight jests. And the film is more than just nostalgia, although there is plenty of that. OBEX is an unlikely adventure, an eccentric character study, and, to borrow another director’s observation, an unexpectedly gentle film. Capturing its combination of mirth, melancholy, innocence, and self-awareness in words is difficult—though perhaps the complimentary side of “quaint” might do. Cinematographer (and script co-writer) Pete Ohs captures the television-feel to a T, and having seen OBEX first on the big screen and recently on my laptop, it felt “right” in both sizes.
That’s what this is: a big adventure that fits right in your pocket, ready for when the whirring and chirping swarm of humdrum life is poised to overwhelm you.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
