‘OBEX’ is a Bewitching Fairytale About a Man Forced to Step Away from His Screens

In Albert Birney’s new film, OBEX, set in 1987, the Baltimore-based filmmaker plays Connor, an agoraphobic of sorts, who spends his days petting his dog, Sandy, and interacting with his many screens. There are TVs in every room, including three stacked on top of each other in the living room, as well as a bookshelf filled with VHS tapes, a dot matrix printer, and a bulky Macintosh computer.

His life is orderly and not without pleasure. He really loves Sandy and sings karaoke to her at night. And he has a job, promoted via classified ad in a computer magazine, where he offers to “Draw you on my computer.” All the while, the cicadas are making a racket outside and driving him a little batty.

But everything changes when he buys an “interactive” computer game called OBEX, featuring a light demon named Ixaroth. At first, the game seems hopelessly rudimentary—he trashes it after a few minutes of play. But then the “interactive” aspect kicks in and Ixaroth enters his home and steals Sandy, forcing Connor to venture out to save his best friend.

With OBEX, Birney has created a bewitching, Alice in Wonderland-like fairy tale about a mild-mannered man forced to step away from the computer screen—and become the star of his own hero’s journey.

We recently chatted with Birney about the film’s inspiration and themes, as well as his dog Dorothy’s big debut.

OBEX is shot in black and white. Were you thinking of The Twilight Zone when you made it?
Yeah, Twilight Zone was a very important show for me. I’d watch it every day when I got home from school on the Syfy Channel. So that’s definitely very deep in the well of my influences. The other big one, which is a film I revisit every couple years and get inspired by, is David Lynch’s Eraserhead. And then the other inspiration, for the second half of the film [when Connor goes on his quest], was Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man with Johnny Depp—the psychedelic Western. Both films are black and white. Certain projects, when they start to take shape in your head, they just tell you what they look like.

The film is essentially about us “living in our computers,” which is very much the reality now. So why set it in 1987?
In 1987, I was five years old, which is kind of the age when you become aware of films and computer games. So I had all these very formative experiences. Of course, today, we have so many screens, we’re constantly looking at them, but this [era] felt like the origin of that. Also, I’ve often found inspiration from old objects and strange artifacts. I love going to thrift stores and junk shops. So I went to a local junk shop and I found two old Macintosh computers, just sitting in a box. And they were priced to move. I didn’t think twice. I just bought them.

And then, a friend had one of these old printers, so I borrowed that. Another friend was getting rid of some TVs, so I grabbed those. And same with the VHS tapes. There were all these things that were just discarded because, you know, they’re obsolete, and I started putting all those things together, and the character and the story came through them. That’s how I usually work.

The star of the movie is obviously Sandy, played by your rescue, Dorothy. Did you know she was such a great actress?
Everyone says I should get her in commercials or other movies. And I’m always like, she is not trained at all. I think this was just the perfect vehicle for her, because we shot it at my house and what she loves to do more than anything else is sit next to me on the sofa or on my lap. If we needed her to bark, we would just knock on the door. If we needed her to look a certain way, we would squeak a squeaky toy. I think, at some point she sensed that she was part of this little team, and we were moving through it together.

She’s insanely cute. What kind of dog is she?
She’s a bulldog, chihuahua, pug—we call her a bull chug.

The cicadas are another major character. You started filming in 2021 when they were out in full force.
Yeah, at that time, I didn’t even have the idea of the movie yet, but I knew, okay, if I want to use these bugs, I need to film them now, because it’ll be another 17 years before they come back. And in our neighborhood—we’re just a little north of Hampden—you’d be walking down the street and they would land on you, just dive bombing.

The shot where Connor takes the garbage out and looks at the garbage and there are cicadas in there? That was just because there were actual cicadas in my garbage can. I started filming it. It was like, I don’t know what this is yet, but I should document it. And then that laid the groundwork for the stuff we filmed a year later.

And that constant cicada buzz? Is that real or a special effect?
I recorded that sound in 2021. It’s real. It was kind of deafening.

Speaking of which, you’re known for your MacGyver-like special effects. What were some of your favorites from the film?
The simplest one is stop motion. So when the cicada crawls underneath the door and Sandy comes over and eats it, that’s just me moving a dead cicada along the floor, inch by inch. Another moment was when Ixaroth is moving through the house and the walls are oscillating a little bit.

My friend, Matt, figured out this thing where, if you had a TV screen laying on its back playing footage from the movie and put a fish tank on top of it and then vibrate the water with something like a speaker, the footage would kind of undulate. And I love that, because it was done very organically and analog. People might think, oh, that must be some sort of modern effect. But it was literally just us filming the footage through moving water.

This is your first time starring in one of your own films. What made you decide to play Connor?
There was definitely a thought of trying to find someone else to play him, but I just kept coming back to the idea that, this is my house, my dog, and it was inspired by all these memories of mine. And it just felt like, if I found someone else to do it, I would always be a little bit annoyed, or nitpicking the performance, or just wishing that I was doing it.

I’m also not like Connor in some ways, but there’s definitely some overlap: I love being at home with my dog and watching movies and being on the computer. And some people, when they watch the movie, they’re like, you know, Connor’s all alone, but he doesn’t necessarily seem too lonely. He’s got a routine that he seems kind of happy with. And I think that’s often how I feel, where I can go days or even weeks sometimes just in my own little world here, and, you know, that’s okay.

Putting the dog in peril was a masterful stroke.
Adopting Dorothy changed my life—just having this dog and this love that suddenly flows out of you. It felt like this would be something that would make sense for Connor, because then he’s not totally alone, and he can talk to her. And then, of course, that becomes the major plot point of like, okay, now she’s the reason he needs to get out of the house and go on this mission to rescue her—this classic quest to rescue the one you love.

OBEX will open locally on Jan. 23, at The Rotunda’s Warehouse Cinemas.