Baltimore filmmaker Albert Birney has built a career out of making movies that feel handmade, intimate, and just a little bit otherworldly. From The Beast Pageant to Sylvio, which was named one of the ten best films of 2017 by The New Yorker, to Strawberry Mansion and beyond, Birney’s work has consistently embraced the mystical, the tactile, and the defiantly strange. With Obex, he may have crafted his most personal transmission yet.
Obex plays like a lo-fi fever dream beamed in from a dusty CRT monitor. Shot in black and white and anchored by practical effects, the film follows a reclusive man named Conor who becomes consumed by a mysterious computer game. What begins as isolation slowly fractures into something existential, playful, and unexpectedly emotional. It is Tron for the analog brain. It is intimate, claustrophobic, and weird in all the right ways.
When I told Birney the film felt deeply personal and defiantly analog, he didn’t hesitate. “It’s definitely pretty close to my story or just kind of like a version,” he explained. “I was a kid in the 80s. Specifically, like 1987, I would have been like five, right at that age of starting to become aware of movies and computer games and videotapes and electronics and all this stuff.” Obex, he says, came from imagining an alternate version of himself. “Kind of imagining if I had been an adult in that time what it would have been like.”
That sense of personal archaeology runs through every frame. Birney, an avid collector of old VHS tapes, televisions, and vintage computers, wanted to make something immediate and self-sufficient. “I just wanted to do a project that I could start filming tomorrow. Wouldn’t have to wait for anybody to approve a script or give me the budget rundown.” Teaming up with collaborator Pete Ohs, he embraced a stripped-down process. “You don’t even have a script. You just kind of figure it out.” What emerged from that instinctive approach was Obex.
One of the film’s most lingering qualities is its claustrophobia. Nearly everything unfolds inside Conor’s contained world of tapes, screens, and static glow. Birney leaned into that deliberately. “I love movies that kind of take place in one place,” he said. “Even though you’re in one place, there’s so many different things you can do in one space.” The film began taking shape in the shadow of 2020, and that isolation naturally seeped in. “Sure, part of me missed the world, but I was also very happy kind of to be at home with all my tapes and video games.” Obex lives in that tension between comfort and confinement.
Pacing was another deliberate choice. While some viewers expect the digital descent to happen immediately, Birney had other plans. “I love a slow movie,” he told me. “Let’s take our time discovering this person’s world and build it up kind of moment by moment.” Because he and Ohs were essentially a two-person crew, they were “thinking about the edit as we’re filming.” The result is a film that feels carefully constructed yet organic, as if it assembled itself in real time.
The influences are proudly worn. The original Legend of Zelda shaped the quest structure and even Conor’s pointed hat and sword. “That’s forever lodged in there as the adventure quest game,” Birney said. He also cited Eraserhead for the first half’s contained dread and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man for the back half’s strange journey into the unknown. And yes, the Nightmare on Elm Street nods are intentional. As someone who shares that same horror affection, I already knew we were going to get along. When he spotted my Freddy Krueger lights in the background and immediately geeked out, it sealed it. We were about to make magic with this interview.
At the emotional center of Obex is Sandy the dog, whose disappearance propels the narrative. That heart wasn’t part of the earliest blueprint. “Sandy kind of came to it late,” Birney admitted. After adopting Dorothy, the dog who plays Sandy, he realized what she unlocked in the story. “This dog is such a lovely addition to our family… I realized, oh, this could actually unlock a lot in Connor’s story.” In a genre that often revolves around saving kingdoms or princesses, Obex chooses something more intimate. “It’s kind of fun to create an adventure story around them where usually it’d be like you’re saving the princess or something, but in this case it’s a dog.”
That blend of small-scale stakes and mythic sincerity defines Birney’s sensibility. His films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, Slamdance, Maryland Film Festival, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival, yet they never feel engineered for mass appeal. Obex especially feels destined for cult status. When I asked whether he sees that kind of afterlife in its future, he smiled at the idea. “That’d be dreamy. That’s always the hope is that these films… find their audience and sometimes that takes some time.” Then he said something that perfectly encapsulates his ethos. “I would love for it to be on a VHS tape on that shelf behind you.”
That is Albert Birney in a nutshell. A filmmaker who measures success not just in box office or algorithms, but in whether someone holds a fuzzy, warbly tape in their hands years from now.
Obex is a ton of fun, just like the mind behind it. It is strange, heartfelt, handmade, and proudly out of step with the mainstream. Talking with Birney felt less like a press obligation and more like a late-night conversation between two horror kids comparing notes. I cannot wait to see what he does next.
Jessie Hobson