One of the least consequential but more intriguing facets of our age of technology acceleration is watching which flavor of tech nostalgia will be the next to manifest. Take vinyl, for instance, which has made the long journey over only the last 40 years from dominant music-listening format to obsolescence to Millennial zeitgeist-fueled renaissance and is now trending back toward disfavor as the CD revival gathers force — not coincidentally, just in time for computer form factors to have near entirely abandoned optical drives. On the other hand, the world of video games, shorter in tooth as it is, has been afforded less time with which to mount any vintage revival, and its symbiotic growth — both in profits and creativity — alongside the microprocessor monolith means the prospect of any full-scale retro revolution always seemed more far-fetched than in other, less post-naughts-tech-indebted artforms. The development of the video game medium feels more tangibly evolutionary than creationary, but this slipstream relationship between generations means that past and present more easily fold into one another, negating the need for and presence of the cleaner lineations than have defined previous booms of specific tech nostalgia. Emulators have only been building in sophistication and scope since the mid-’90s and were finally made available in the Apple app store in 2024, ROM hacking and homebrew software have led to genuine innovation, and Nintendo has even integrated access to past console catalogues via their Switch subscription service, meaning the born-online, tech-literate-as-tots Gen Alpha may very well be more versed in legacy gaming than those born during their prime.
Into this emerging era of video game mutualism and alternating currents enters Albert Birney’s OBEX, a film that has little to do with and nothing to say about such narratives of industry evolution, but which arrives with a playful 8-bit aesthetic that speaks directly to the overlap of this historical space and present concerns of technological oversaturation.The film opens in a wash of yesteryear tech ephemera: a Macintosh 128K, a dot matrix printer spitting out pin-feed paper, a staticky CRT TV (the news on which sets the film in September 1987). Conor (Birney) is an ASCII artist who produces printed portraits using his aforementioned cutting edge rig and exists somewhere on the anxious-agoraphobe continuum. He lives alone with his dog Sandy, receives Wednesday grocery deliveries from his neighbor Mary (an unseen Callie Hernandez), and otherwise immerses himself in solitary digital pursuits. But when he stumbles across a print ad for the new state-of-the-art video game OBEX and orders it, things begin to get weird… and high adventure… and Lynchian.
It’s that last descriptor that is likely to somewhere in the early going offer an inflection point for viewers. Shot in black-and-white and with palpable aesthetic shades of Eraserhead and Videodrome, as well as inserts of grotesquerie and freighted symbolic imagery — Birney utilizes the 1987 Brood X cicada emergence to shade the proceedings with a hint of apocalyptic texture, for instance — there’s reason for momentary concern that the whole of the project will amount of little more than amiable Lynchian pastiche. But tapping out too early on the basis of such an assumption would be a mistake. After Conor quickly abandons the seemingly half-assed game, he soon discovers a printout with the ominous directive “REMOVE YOUR SKIN” filling the page, after which Sandy is kidnapped in the middle of the night by a digital demon who emerges from the TV — and who amusingly looks like AGGRO DR1FT’s Toto (or Birney’s own The Beast Pageant) filtered through overexposed X-ray imagery, with a dash a flicker effect thrown in for good measure. In addition to the Lynch associations, the thematic concerns Birney develops here also recall Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, but from here BIrney actually moves in a more unexpected direction, as Conor is pulled into a Zelda-esque fantasy world, replete with a shopkeeper hawking useful wares for Conor’s quest, a cartological sketch of the limited world (no roads, ending with a castle in The Nightmare Realm where Sandy is presumably being held), and a new Robin Hood-style hat for our adventuring hero. After besting a horde of bug people, he also scores himself a sidekick named Victor (Frank Mosely), named after the RCA Victor tube TV he boasts as a head (admittedly not a typical fantasy realm signifier).
If there’s disappointment to OBEX, it comes in its second stretch feeling a bit short-circuited, arriving well over halfway in and registering as a bit too abbreviated next to the more patient first act. In our present age of film bloat, where disposable properties like M3GAN 2.0 forego the opportunity for potent short form camp in favor of two-hour capital-T thoughts of the middle school variety, it’s rare for a genre property to beg for length, but Birney’s latest would have benefitted from extended play in the lo-fi fantasy realm the director conjures, its aesthetic character harkening to pre-Anxious Generation days of childhood recreation, where the backyard shenanigans and Nintendo sleepovers were far more psychologically symbiotic activities. Still, in the end it’s precisely this intersection that Birney manages to fill OBEX’s frames with, his vision both playful — this may be the best (non-)video game adaptation cinema has yet produced — and moving, culminating in a more introspective, earnest work than many of his most recent projects. Where something like Strawberry Mansion saw Birney’s imaginative capacity push toward what felt like willful eccentricity and twee genre noodling in unproductive ways, OBEX’s nostalgia-twinged proceedings reflect a more melancholic ache for the community and joy of early gaming console days, a time when a sense of wonder was not yet deadened by the tempest of screens that permeate all of modern life. But while there may be nods and hat-tips toward such contemporary discourse, Birney smartly avoids any pedantic dithering, preferring to keep the subtext implied and the text intimate and direct: “By playing the game, you killed your dog.” What happier ending, what better riposte to The Nightmare Realm, then, can one imagine than sitting, unplugged and screen-free, on the beach with your dog, waves lapping against one perfect moment.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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