By Jordan Crucchiola
It’s a desire you hear so often among those in filmmaking circles. I just want to make cool stuff with my friends. With the NEXT selection OBEX, writer, director, editor, and star Albert Birney was able to live out that dream, and the passion project that was shot in his house has brought the film team all the way to the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
“This is incredible,” Birney says to the audience. “Thank you Sundance, and thank you all for coming out tonight. We were walking up Main Street and the snow was falling, and it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘This is just perfect.’ This film, OBEX, I put everything I love into it. I made it with everyone I love, and I’m hoping to share that love tonight.”
OBEX was filmed over the course of two years in separate stages. One stage was filmed at Birney’s Maryland home and centers on his character, Conor, living as a shut-in and making money by selling portraits of people he creates in a text program on his boxy computer. (Vital context: OBEX is set in 1987.) He advertises his services in a computer magazine and goes by the name Computer Conor. The second half of the film takes place in the video game world that is the namesake for Birney’s feature. OBEX: a choose your own adventure game that has the novel pitch of putting the player in the game so they can slay a mythical demon.
What Conor doesn’t realize when he buys the game is that he would literally end up inside it. And a man that pays his kindly neighbor to do grocery runs for him so he doesn’t have to leave his property is suddenly thrust into a quest where he’s battling cicada monsters, traversing the landscape with a guide who has a TV for a head, and seizing an opportunity for adventure.
In the post-show Q&A, Birney and his film team describe a collaborative process that was natural and intuitive, with creative decisions made based on what felt right in the moment. When the director started picturing the film in his mind, he saw it in black and white. So OBEX is in black and white. Actor Callie Hernandez got very into the idea of wearing a variety of wigs, and Birney approved. And when the director sat down with his composer Josh Dibb, Dibb would spin up melodies and Birney would often tell him on the spot what was working. “In a lot of cases, some of those cues happened in the space of 15 minutes, and he’d go ‘That’s it! We’re good.’ And I’d want to tweak it and he’d go ‘Nope! No tweaks. We’re done.’ I’d say, ‘But this is just a sketch!’ And he’d tell me it’s not a sketch. It’s done.”
When asked how the visual style of the movie came together, cinematographer Pete Ohs told the audience, “I don’t know if I’d even say the visual style was developed. Filming things the way I want to film them, I know how Albert likes things,” explains Ohs, who also co-wrote, produced, and edited OBEX. ”I feel like the movie was made intuitively. Just pure creative bliss for like two 15-year-old kids making a movie. So it’s like we didn’t think about anything. We just followed our intuition and said, ‘This seems fun. Let’s keep going in that direction.’”
Movies can famously be very difficult to make, but every once in a while the gods of creativity and logistics smile on a project. So much so that even his dog, Dorothy, would reliably hit her marks during filming. “There’s something about following intuition that makes it seem like things are magic,” says Ohs. “And it feels good when it feels like magic is real.”
