OBEX

Even though we can pick our flavor of digital numbing, Birney brings his DIY mentality and a host of collaborators who are in sync with his sensibilities to craft a project that shakes us out of the tempting lull and urges us to live life as an NPC.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

More contained than “Strawberry Mansion” but with similarly expansive ideas, “Obex” feels opportune for the modern era.

OBEX is an earnest, strange, and delightful adventure.

This blend of genres, aesthetics, realities, and virtual realities doesn’t all add up—or adds up a bit too neatly, as the script makes Conor’s hazy backstory unmistakably clear—but OBEX is still endearingly contained, passionately executed, and impressively unique.

There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.

Its gentleness and incremental increases in weirdness are a feature, not a bug.