Obex director made a Lynchian thriller more informed by Zelda than movies
SOURCE:Polygon|BY:Matt Patches
2026's newest video game movie is a tiny indie you haven't heard of, but for anyone who loves Nintendo or old computer games, it's a must see.
Published 20 hours ago
Video game movies rarely capture what it's like to play. Albert Birney's Obex hits differently.
‘Maybe it's a video game, maybe it's a movie, maybe it's both’: How an indie filmmaker wound up making Zelda by way of David Lynch
Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Albert Birney didn’t set out to make a “video game movie.” It just kinda… happened.
Between larger projects — including a follow-up to 2021’s Strawberry Mansion, the surrealist fantasy he co-directed with filmmaker and NoBudge founder Kentucker Audley — Birney found himself stuck in a familiar creative purgatory. Ideas were piling up, but the stars weren’t aligning. So he did what anyone with the indie film bug would do: called a cameraman to come shoot a movie starring him and his dog.
The impulse to make something resulted in Obex, a black-and-white DIY fever dream arriving to theaters on Jan. 9 that plays like David Lynch’s take on an Apple II game. Set in 1987, the film follows Conor (Birney), a man living in isolation with his dog Sandy, who kills time with early computers and late-night horror marathons. When Conor encounters a strange new computer game called Obex, it pulls him into a digital wonderland and destabilizes his reality. With all due respect to Tron Ares… Obex gets it.
Birney approached Obex having made an actual video game. The year before embarking on his homegrown fantasy, he collaborated with developer Gabriel Koenig on a Tux and Fanny game, based on his animated series. Watching people play it live on Twitch changed how Birney thought about storytelling. “It was incredible,” he says. “With the video game, it was in real time and everyone was bringing their own kind of story to the game.”
That immediacy stuck with him. Games, he realized, weren’t just adjacent to his filmmaking — they were foundational. While Birney is religious in his once-a-decade rewatches of Eraserhead, many fibers of his being were made up of interactive memories as well. “Some of my earliest memories are also playing video games, Nintendo and stuff,” Birney says. “This movie was just trying to honor that, or explore that, video games are as much an important part of my life as movies.”
At first, Birney imagined Obex as something deliberately undefined. “Maybe it's a video game, maybe it's a movie, maybe it's both,” he recalls. But as the idea took shape, practicality intervened. He knew how to make a movie. He knew how to do it cheaply. And more importantly, he knew he could do it at home with his pup.
So Obex became a solo endeavor. Birney starred in it himself and filmed in his own home, with one close friend, Pete Ohs (Erupcja), helping shoot and shape the story day by day. There was no finished script, only an outline, and Birney says even that was flexible. “The movie I'm planning with Kentucker, it's big, there are lots of moving parts — it's something that you can't just begin making. You've got to have a lot of things in order. So Obex just was born out of that desire to make something fast, to make something kind of close to my heart.”
That looseness defines the film’s vibe. Scenes evolve according to instinct rather than plot logic, drifting into one another with dreamlike elasticity. Birney credits that approach to allowing himself what David Lynch famously calls “room to dream.” Each morning, he and Pete would decide what felt right to shoot. “In the same way where dreams can kind of suddenly shift and you're in a whole new place or there's new people_, you’re like, Let's just see what it wants to be, what the next scene is going to present itself to be_.”
What it was like directing and acting in Obex
Photo: Albert Birney/Oscilloscope Laboratories
The process had its challenges. Early on, Conor was supposed to discover the Obex video game and immediately fall into it. But by day three of filming, Birney realized the problem. “That's just me sitting at a computer,” he says. “And also we don't even have the game.” The solution was counterintuitive — and far more interesting. What if the game wasn’t just fun, but also completely absorbing?
That decision unlocked the film’s strange internal logic, where the in-world Obex isn’t escapism but intrusion on attention. That blur of enjoyment reflects Birney’s own relationship with games, especially the ones he grew up watching and playing. He keeps returning to the feeling of being a child, watching The Legend of Zelda unfold on a TV screen. “The vastness of that feeling,” he says. “You get lost in a way that is so magical.”
It’s a feeling he admits he no longer gets from modern open-world games. While he admires Breath of the Wild, he finds its freedom paralyzing. “Once the world opens up and I can do anything […] that's usually where I get overwhelmed,” Birney says. Older games, with their limitations and abstraction, left more room for imagination, much like OBEX as a film. (Though for anyone who thinks this is a small mumblecore joint, the movie still squeezes in monster attacks, land traversal, and magic on its indie budget.)
Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Only after the film began to take shape did the Obex game start to exist for real. Birney sent edited scenes to Koenig, who animated them in Unity, building gameplay that mirrored the movie’s tone. Now, the fictional game at the center of OBEX is nearing completion as an actual release. “We're now nearing the end of making an actual OBEX game,” Birney says, though it’s been scaled back from his original dream of a sprawling RPG into something closer to a classic platformer.
The evolution feels fitting. Obex, the film, exists because of limits — time, money, technology, life. Rather than fight those constraints, Birney embraced them, turning a creative itch into a movie that feels handmade and haunted. His vague idea morphed into a story about how art forms bleed into each other. And maybe one day, after its theatrical release this month, it’ll become its own livestream event that he’ll behold in all its chat-enabled glory. He’d dig that.
“I would love every movie to be seen in a 500 seat theater to a sold out house. But in just the reality of the world we're living in now, maybe Twitch with the comments on the side is the next best type of thing. It certainly beats just watching it alone on your phone on the sofa or in bed or something.”
Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories