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‘OBEX’ Review: Albert Birney’s Peculiar Genre Mash-Up Pays Homage To Analog Tech – Sundance Film Festival


‘OBEX’ review: Albert Birney’s peculiar genre mash-up pays homage to analog tech – Sundance Film Festival

Conor, now heavily bearded, has entered the world of “OBEX”, where, guided by an ethereal, shimmering parallel-world version Mary (who works in the gift shop selling elixirs and weaponry), he must find his way through The Dark Forest, through The Peaks of Peril and The Valley of Bones, to The Nightmare Realm—home of Ixaroth, who has taken Sandy. It plays out like a whimsical Videodrome, with major nods to the mysterious, industrial shadows of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, though Birney doesn’t really go all-out into horror, sci-fi or even fantasy, for that matter. Like a lot of the genre films debuting at Sundance this year, OBEX is a peculiar mash-up of influences (Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess might be one comparison, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls another), which would explain its planting in the more avant-garde NEXT strand as opposed to Midnight.

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