On a gray January morning, with the awards-season machinery already grinding toward its inevitable climax, a strange little movie slunk into theaters. It wasn’t a superhero origin story. It wasn’t a prestige biopic. It was a 91-minute fever dream about a man, his dog, and a cursed computer game called OBEX. And while it didn’t set the box office alight, it has spent the intervening months burrowing into the psyches of everyone who took the plunge. Now, as we approach the end of summer, it feels like the right moment to ask: what exactly was that thing we watched?
To call Albert Birney’s film “genre-defying” is almost an understatement. It is a fantasy, an adventure, and a horror movie, but these labels feel like a coat rack struggling under the weight of too many heavy coats. The plot, such as it is, is deceptively simple. Conor Marsh (played by Birney himself) lives a hermetic existence with his faithful dog, Sandy, played by the scene-stealing Dorothy the Dog. Their routine is quiet, almost monastic. Then Conor acquires OBEX, a state-of-the-art computer game that promises immersive escapism. When Sandy vanishes without a trace - not from the living room, but from existence itself - Conor realizes the game has bled into his reality. To get her back, he must enter the digital wilderness, facing its surreal denizens.
What follows is less a narrative and more a descent into a meticulously crafted dream logic. Birney, who also directs, has constructed a world that feels like a lost VHS tape from 1988, one that you’re not entirely sure your uncle actually owned. The aesthetic is lo-fi, tactile, and analog in a way that feels radical in our age of slick, photorealistic CGI. There’s a grainy texture to the visuals, a reliance on practical effects and chunky, low-polygon digital environments that evoke the early days of home computing. It is deliberately, gloriously uncanny - a place where the rules of physics are merely suggestions.
The film’s central gambit is its blurring of identity. Conor is also Ixaroth, the game’s in-game avatar, and the film toggles between these states with a disorienting fluidity that keeps the audience off-balance. Is the game a portal, a manifestation of grief, or a literal hellscape? Birney wisely refuses to answer. He’s more interested in the emotional resonance of the journey than in the mechanical specifics of the lore.
That emotional core rests on the unshakeable bond between man and beast. Dorothy the Dog is a revelation, offering a grounded, authentic performance that anchors the increasingly weird proceedings. When Conor ventures into the strange world of OBEX, searching through fields and facing the monstrous Knight (another role for Tyler Davis), the audience is given a simple, primal hook: the desperation to find a lost family member. The horror here isn't the jump-scare variety; it’s the existential dread of losing one’s anchor to the real world.
The supporting cast, including Callie Hernandez as Mary, Paisley Isaacs as Mom, and Frank Mosley as Victor, all seem to exist in the same off-kilter frequency, delivering their lines with a naturalism that feels slightly out of sync, as if they too are unsure whether they are real or rendered. It’s a knowingly artificial touch that works in the film’s favor, adding to the pervasive sense of unreality.
However, this deliberate opacity will frustrate as many viewers as it enchants. The film’s TMDb rating sits at a middling 5.95/10, a number that suggests a love-it-or-hate-it polarization. For every viewer who leaves the theater feeling they’ve witnessed a singular work of outsider art, there’s another who will leave scratching their head, wondering if the projector malfunctioned. The plot’s ambiguity can drift into the obtuse, and the low-stakes pacing of the opening act might test the patience of more conventional viewers.
Yet, to dismiss OBEX as pretentious or incoherent is to miss the point entirely. This is a film that trusts its audience to surrender to feeling over logic. It’s a meditation on loneliness, on the blurring line between the worlds we build and the worlds we inhabit, and on the lengths we will go to for the ones we love - even if that love is returned with a wagging tail.
As the summer blockbusters fade and the cinephile autumn begins, OBEX stands as a defiant artifact. It is a reminder that cinema, even in Hollywood, can be deeply personal, weird, and unapologetically idiosyncratic. It may not be for everyone. But for those who let it, this strange journey into the heart of a pixelated darkness will linger long after the screen goes black. We’re still not sure if Conor ever truly found his way out, or if he even wanted to.
