Article #253487

Director and star Albert Birney goes through the looking glass to tackle a Zelda-esque dog rescue quest inside his 80s gaming machine in endearingly imaginative fantasy

If David Lynch had been born 20 years later and fetishised 1980s home-computing tech, this is the kind of film he might have made: black-and-white analogue surrealism, with smudges of dot-matrix horror. Director Albert Birney stars as “Computer Conor”, a shut-in who makes a living from virtuosically tapping out ASCII reproductions of people’s favourite photos and, on his downtime, watching several VHSs simultaneously on his three-television-high stack.

Outside is Mary (Callie Hernandez), an unseen grocery-delivery girl, and the unsettling writhings of the biological world in the shape of an emerging cicada brood. But Conor is invaded from within when he subscribes to Obex, a mail-order sword-and-sorcery video game that allows you to personalise your own avatar. Initially disappointed, he becomes more enveloped when his printer of its own accord spits out a command: “Remove your skin.” And then the game’s radiant demon Ixaroth arrives in his apartment and spirits away Conor’s pooch, Sandy.