OBEX (2026) [Movie Review] — A Quiet, Strange Arcade of the Heart

Albert Birney’s OBEX is a small-scale science fiction film with unexpectedly large emotional ambitions. Set in 1987 and written by Birney and Pete Ohs, the movie refracts contemporary anxieties about screens and solitude through lo-fi, analog textures. It’s less about spectacle and more about the physics of loneliness — how a life of soft comforts can calcify into invisibility, and how a strange arcade game becomes the unlikely site of rescue and reckoning.

Plot & themes

From suburban routine to a fantastical rescue mission

At its center is Conor Marsh (Albert Birney), a contentably solitary man whose companionship is a loyal dog, Sandy (Dorothy). His world — three TVs, careful domestic rituals, the hum of appliances — is upended when an enigmatic video game called OBEX promises full immersion: scan yourself into a digital realm to face the demon king Ixaroth. When Sandy is abducted into that game, Conor’s retreat becomes a quest. What follows is part fairy tale, part allegory: a man forced back into life by a quest to save the thing he loves most. The film uses its 1980s trappings not as nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but as a controlled palette to examine why we flee into media and what we risk by doing so.

Direction & screenplay

A director-actor who trusts mood over exposition

Albert Birney wears many hats here — co-writer, director, and lead — and he leans into an intimate, DIY sensibility. The screenplay (Birney and Pete Ohs) resists tidy explanations; instead, it stages sensory puzzles and lets atmosphere carry truth. Birney’s direction favors prolonged observation: small domestic rituals, oddly framed POVs (toaster, keyboard), and patient beats that allow the viewer to inhabit Conor’s inertia. That restraint can feel indulgent at times, but it’s also what makes OBEX a film that grows on you rather than announces itself.

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Performances

Subtle, soulful, and strangely comic

Birney’s performance as Conor is quietly affecting — he makes the character’s stasis feel like a deliberate choice rather than laziness. Callie Hernandez, as neighbor Mary, supplies warmth and occasional levity; her presence reminds the audience what human company feels like. Frank Mosley, notably cast as a traveling companion with a TV for a head, gives the film its most surreal, darkly comic moments. Dorothy (Sandy) is a scene-stealer, delivering canine charisma with uncanny timing. The ensemble’s low-key style suits the material: none of the actors shouts for our attention, but all of them earn it.

Visuals & sound design

Analog textures meet haunted electronica

Cinematographer and co-writer Pete Ohs helps craft a film that is visually inventive without being showy. Framing from household objects and a grainy, tactile palette make Conor’s home feel lived in and oddly sacred. Sound design by Kevin Hill and Matthew Giordano merges ambient hums — cicadas, kettle hisses, TV static — into a hypnotic wash that blurs the boundary between digital and physical. Josh Dibb’s score, spectral and synth-piercing, punctuates the film’s fairy-tale logic. Together, these elements build a sensory world that’s both melancholic and strangely inviting.

Strengths & shortcomings

Where the film wins — and where it hesitates

OBEX’s greatest strength is its tonal originality: it reimagines the video-game premise as a tender moral fable rather than an effects showcase. Its pacing and introspective focus will delight viewers who favor mood pieces. Yet the film’s reluctance to fully dramatize emotional beats can leave some scenes feeling underplayed; viewers expecting conventional sci-fi thrills may find the middle act too domestic. Still, many will appreciate that Birney trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity.

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Verdict: 7.5/10

A modest gem for patient viewers

OBEX is a thoughtful, eccentric science fiction film that asks you to trade the adrenaline of spectacle for the slow pleasures of tone and texture. It’s a movie that nudges rather than shouts, and in doing so, it reveals a tender thesis: screens can steal life, but they can also be the doorway back. For cinephiles who enjoy meditative, well-crafted indie sci-fi, OBEX is worth the trip.