Quirky Film From Baltimore’s Albert Birney Serves as Lo-Fi Anti-‘Avatar’

Should the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce hope to alter the popular image of its city as a haven of eccentricity then it should stay away from promoting Albert Birney’s new film, “Obex.” Baltimore proper doesn’t feature much in this self-styled “skewed lo-fi fantasy,” but the tenor is of a piece with a locale that gave us Edgar Allan Poe, John Waters and the American Visionary Art Museum. Disturbing, kitschy and filled to the rafters with jerry-rigged objects, Mr. Birney’s picture fits the bill.“Obex” is a tale of mysterious forces keyed to encroaching technology and defined through means that are defiantly anti-CGI. The irony is that at the center of the story is an agoraphobic man-child who is catapulted into another place and time through the wiles of the digital age. It’s a hot button issue here in 2026, sure, but Mr. Birney takes it on by bringing us back to the halcyon days of pre-internet 1987 or, as my students are fond of calling it, “The Before Times.” The computer is less a harbinger of a brave new world in “Obex” than the bastard son of television. Mr. Birney plays Conor, a loner who has a lot of TVs in his modest home, not least a totem pole of the devices stacked up in the living room. He doesn’t get out much, our anti-hero, just to the backyard so his dog Sandy (credited here as “Dorothy”) can take care of her daily ablutions. A neighbor, Mary (Callie Hernandez), does Conor’s grocery shopping, leaving the goods outside the front door.Conor makes a living by replicating photographs using his aged Mac and transcribing the images using symbols on his keyboard. These commissions come via the U.S. post: Conor has placed an ad for his services in a nationally distributed gearhead magazine. At $5 a pop, these portraits keep Conor and Sandy afloat in material necessities. It’s when their lives become immaterial that things get weird.While flipping through an issue of “Personal Computing,” Conor comes across an advertisement for “a breakthrough in INTERACTIVE GAMING that puts YOU inside the game.” Obex, as it is called, challenges the user to “make it to the end of the maze and defeat the demon IXAROTH before he eats your immortal soul.” The ad is printed white on black and features illustrations of a castle, the human brain, spindly alien beings, and the head of a monster that looks as if it’s been cribbed from a middle-schooler’s notebook.Scene from ‘Obex.’ Via Oscilloscope LaboratoriesConor’s interest is piqued. He films a videocassette introduction of himself and Sandy, and sends it along with $20 to Concatix Software, a business concern located in Pittsburgh. Soon thereafter, a floppy disc arrives and Conor inserts it into his computer. Obex is a game of tinker-toy proportions, a primitive cut-and-paste venture that will, I predict, elicit belly laughs from 21st-century audiences.Conor plays the game and it proves to be a non-event of enormous proportions. Frustrated and disappointed, he hits the sack, whereupon we watch as a flickering malevolent being — yes, it’s Ixaroth — emerges from the depths of Conor’s television screens to make off with … Sandy. Listen, you don’t take a guy’s dog. He’ll end up doing rash things — like going outside. Conor searches for Sandy in a nearby wooded area, finds a computer marooned in the weeds, and sees that Obex is up and running on it with Sandy trapped in its pixelated environs. Before you can say “J.R.R. Tolkien meets David Lynch,” Conor is transported to a land of fairies, castles, a “Swamp of Eternal Sadness,” and — who would’ve guessed it — neighbor Mary, who glows, glitters, and runs a vintage tchotchke emporium.Filmed in grainy black-and-white with a special effects budget that must’ve topped out at $1.99, “Obex” is in the fine tradition of Mike Cheslik’s “Hundreds of Beavers” (2022) and John and Zelda Adams’ “Where the Devil Roams” (2023) — that is to say, do-it-yourself entertainments in which creative energy and imaginative reach is spurred by economic necessity. The narrow audience Mr. Birney is content to cultivate will prize this off-kilter tale about swarms of cicadas, ever-present dead mothers, and an RCA Victor TV that walks, talks and is a font of positivity. Should a hot cup of anti-“Avatar” quirkiness sound diverting, take a chance on “Obex.”

Quirky Film From Baltimore’s Albert Birney Serves as Lo-Fi Anti-‘Avatar’

Quirky Film From Baltimore’s Albert Birney Serves as Lo-Fi Anti-‘Avatar’

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