A quirky, charming throwback to no-budget, homemade indie films
At its core, OBEX is a film about a man who goes into a computer RPG in 1987 to save his dog who has been kidnapped by the demon antagonist of the game. It’s a simple, black and white, low-fi indie film about not only the importance of companionship but the need to occasionally go outside and touch grass. I’m sure there is a deeper read of the film, but part of its charm is its relative simplicity.
When reading through descriptions of the films on the Sundance slate, I kept coming back to OBEX. The logline seemed weird and oblique and intriguing. It didn’t sound like anything else playing at the festival. And while it didn’t have the emotional gravitas or polished skill of most of the films playing, it felt like watching a film at the festival thirty years ago.
There’s discussion and discourse on the state of the modern festival in Park City. This is not the place for it, but a lot of people have questioned the mainstream nature the festival has adopted over the years. Many of the films showing already have distribution deals and/or were financed by larger studios. Films without are often snatched up in bidding wars (these days mainly from streamers desperate for content and prestige). What is shown at Sundance often has the polish and look of a major studio film.
OBEX reminds me of a time where Sundance was home to weird, low-budget indie films like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, or Christopher Nolan’s The Following (which was actually screened at Slamdance, at alt-alternative festival to Sundance), or Shane Caruth’s Primer. Movies made with borrowed money from parents and dentists, shot as cheaply as possible, assembled using every friend and family member and favor a filmmaker had. OBEX feels like a film a bunch of friends made in their backyards and houses over weekends for a year.
And in that context, it’s pretty great.
OBEX follows Conor—an isolated introvert who doesn’t associate with the outside world. It’s 1987 in Baltimore and there’s a large influx of the once-every-seventeen-years Cicada population, which represents the loud, oppressive and scary nature of the outside. Conor has his computer, his massive collection of VHS tapes and his dog Sandy. By day, he creates digital portraits of people using characters and wingdings, dot matrix printed across the page like a pixelated mosaic. He has someone named “Mary” who delivers his groceries every week. They talk through the door but never face to face. He advertises his work in a computer magazine. It’s in this very magazine that he sees an advertisement for a new computer RPG called “OBEX.” They boast that if you send in some pictures of yourself with some personal details, they will customize the gaming experience for you.
He does this and the game he gets back is very simple and unsatisfactory. So he deletes it and moves on. But the game won’t stay deleted. The main antagonist of the game, the demon Ixaroth, comes out of his computer and steals Sandy. The only way to save her is to go into the game and come find her. And so Conor does. We transition from black and white scenes of suburban loneliness to black and white scenes of “epic” (read: some costumes and shot out in the woods) adventure.
OBEX is shot entirely in grainy black and white with a charming synth soundtrack with a cast of only a handful of people. It has the DIY look and feel that makes you say “I could do that!” but in a way that inspires you to make a film, not in a condescending “I could do it better” way. And while the overall aesthetic is very low budget, the stakes and escalations of the characters aren’t very dramatic, and the scenes sometimes drift from idea to idea without the clearest direction, OBEX is a delightfully quirky piece of indie cinema that I’m glad exists and found its way to Sundance. It reminds me of bad Saturday afternoon cable access movies, but with more charm and care put into it than you would expect. Things like Stranger Things pull on the nostalgia of the 1980s VHS culture, but OBEX feels like a true love letter to that era, instead of a spectator sport.
Watching OBEX made me want to make my own small indie film. And while I can’t say if that’ll happen or not, just watching something that inspires you to create is a true gift. As a movie, it’s not great. But as an experience presented to you by a group of indie filmmakers at a festival that, at its core, was about finding and promoting indie voices, it was very inspiring and exciting.
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