Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Albert Birney
Starring: Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Paisley Isaacs, Frank Mosley, Tyler Davis
With an industry worth
$273 billion plus
- a business which supersedes the music and film sectors PUT TOGETHER and
which, unlike the old-fashioned fields of showbusiness, is exponentially
growing - it is hard to imagine a time when video gaming media was a niche
concern. Even today, it is estranging that legacy media platforms
Hollywood carry-on and pop star drama while ignoring the creative forces
and industry involved in video games. After all, the synergy is vampiric.
This month there was a new Silent Hill film, with another
Resident Evil yet to come (which, according to Google AI
summary "returns to the original game's horror roots"). The kids love
Mario, Sonic and Chicken Jockey (the latter was 2025's biggest film, ofc).
And there is the portentous runaway indie success Iron Lung, an epic two hour plus film based on the game of the same name, and
auteured by YouTube gamer Markiplier. I've not seen it, because it's not
for me, but for the Markiplites this was appointment viewing, and the film
romped to unsanctioned mainstream success (which, in the same way that
people getting annoyed at the
Five Nights at Freddy's
film does, just amuses me no end. Suck it up, unc).
It is an interesting cultural context, then, for the release of
Obex, Albert Birney's metroidvania masterpiece (co-written with
Pete Ohs). Set in 1987, Obex focuses on adult
introvert Conor (Birney, adorable) and his Staffy Sandy (Dorothy, ibid). A
shut-in whose situation borders on the agoraphobic, Conor can't even open
the door to the kind voice of his neighbour (Callie Hernandez) who
sources food for him. Instead, he ekes a living fashioning pixel portraits
of loved one's photographs posted to him from cross-country customers,
looks forward to films on TV (according to a commercial,
Nightmare on Elm Street is scheduled... "We're definitely
going to watch that," Conor tells Sandy, hooking a blank video cassette
from his wall to wall shelves of VHS), and plays text-based RPG games on
his home computer, which still uses floppy discs.
The iconography is explicitly vintage, a Robert Tinney (RIP this month xx)
imaginarium of blocky plastic keyboards, big tellies and low-poly
renderings. Birney makes no bones about Obex's fetishisation of the analogue: when Conor films himself in response to
a Personal Computing magazine advert for mysterious game Obex, a maze
simulation which uses players' likenesses and wherein losing involves the
consumption of "your mortal soul," his camera lingers on the blocky
U‑Matic camera Conor utilises to capture himself, as it does the prolonged
crunch and whirr of his dot-matrix printer... A pivotal year for
video games (PC gaming stepped up, Nintendo consolidated its control,
various franchises established) and at the cusp of a digital revolution,
1987 might also have been the last time all of this tech seemed truly
magical and exciting. As if the future was finally happening...
Birney films in wide angles, blocking Conor within tight walls, ceilings,
floors to emphasise the character's isolation. He plays alone, a concept
alien to today's gamers (where solo play is simply practice), within a
bittersweet mechanical existence, enlivened by Birney's sharp and original
eye for visuals (Conor watches TV by means of a triple stack of sets, like
a film strip come to life) and the encroaching menacing presence of
cicadas (the most unsettling of all insects). It is gently ho-hum until
one morning, following a desultory play through it transpires that Sandy
has been sucked into the gaming world of Obex, dognapped by the disturbing
flicker of its antagonist bleeding into our world. Thus, Conor must do the
full Joseph Campbell and himself venture into the low-res aesthetic...
Within Obex, the frame opens up into an off-beat arcadia of forests,
fields and a far-off volcano. Cicada men attack and a TV is
anthropomorphised (in the manner of Fiona Staples' imperial Saga designs),
while Conor's neighbour is reconfigured as a medieval shopkeeping npc
(supporting the devastating reading that this is all a digitally induced
psychosis).
The experience is destabilising; watching Obex is at once
strangely, dreamlike familiar but also authentically weird. This is due in
no small way to the film's manifest horror - the game instructs Conor to
"remove your skin," and there is an especially cruel edge to the
persistent suffering Birney puts his characters through (early on, in a
knowing omen, Conor performs solo karaoke to retro-futurist Gary Numan's
'Cars': "Where the image breaks down/Will you visit me please?"). Talk
about period pleasures: Obex feels like an old school
midnight movie, as if you are watching something prohibited; a film with
its own mercurial charge whereby a potentially hostile malice exists
within the frame.
A roguelike box of delights, this lofi
Ready Player One
(a late-stage intertextual cameo made me laugh out loud - the audacity!)
demands to be seen and thrilled over. Birney's Obex mines
the liminal nexus of cinematic visuals and video game narratives to
provide a truly haunting playthrough.
Obex is on UK/ROI VOD from March
9th.
