OBEX had its Canadian premiere on July 29 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It’s 1987. “Computer” Conor (Albert Birney, who also directs) spends his morning talking lovingly to his dog Sandy and watching the news on one of the three television sets stacked in a row in the middle of his living room. He works from home, rapidly typing out on his Macintosh computer digital recreations of photographs that people send to him. His neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) arrives weekly to check up on him and bring him groceries, but he never opens the door.

While thumbing through a computer hobbyist catalogue, Conor stumbles upon a mysterious ad for a video game called “OBEX.” Not only is it a game, but it is purported to be able to put the player into the game. Conor, intrigued, films himself on his RCA video recorder so that the company can get images of his body at various angles.

When he receives the game, it is not all that it was cracked up to be. An overworld display shows an image of him, a castle, and a donkey, but he can’t interact with anything else. Disappointed, he trashes the game and moves on with his humdrum daily life. But the game has other plans for him and his little dog Sandy.

OBEX is an imaginative excursion into 1980s computer and video game culture, a largely solitary experience that nevertheless offered opportunities for multiple creative outlets. For Conor, the dreamlike (and occasionally nightmarish) portal into the video game world affords him a new outlook on his family past, his decisively ordinary present, and his potentially full future. The ordeal is mostly tempered and sweet, save for the few instances where video game mechanics require flashes of 8-bit action and/or horror.

The film’s sound design is intriguingly noisy, incorporating sonic fuzz and static that fits with the video game aesthetic and an idiosyncratic cicada motif. But it also gets overbearing and altogether too noisy when it matters the most. In the most palpably weird moments, the soundtrack becomes a distraction. However, the main theme of Josh Dibb’s fittingly retro score is a pleasing countermelody to this noise.

What is most impressive about OBEX—aside from the fact that this video game love letter is actually a back-door ode to dog lover’s—is its creative and wonderfully lo-fi visual effects. Beyond simply recreating the polygonal video game avatars of yore (though this is also done well), the film produces an array of different VFX designs which are delightful. At their best, these effects are phantasmagoric; at their worst, they are skeleton bones you could pick up at Target during the Halloween season. On both ends of the spectrum, the aesthetic maintains a charm that carries the film.

For whatever reason, the segment of the film in which Conor goes through his mundane agoraphobic routine is more interesting to me than the climactic final act that occurs within the game world. The visuals of the game may be fun, but the progression of the story stalls during the game’s fetch quest. The entire experience is a metaphor for Conor needing to get out of his shell, and this theme is better explored before Conor wakes up in the game, when it is not a metaphor but a lived reality that he is actively grappling with.

Still, Birney’s film is a light, charming affair. But it isn’t saccharine. There is some needling imagery that gets under the skin, and there is a darker side to the character’s hermitage that opens the door to the potential for a less happy ending.

OBEX: B-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)