CCFF 2025 Reviewed: OBEX, Mr. K.

Two surreal, hard-to-forget movies about finding strength through adversity.

OBEX

OBEX, a miraculous oddball directed, co-written by, and starring Baltimore-based filmmaker Albert Birney, takes the well-trod hero's journey and reboots it with the blocky veneer of Apple IIGS aesthetics and the playful inanity of point-and-click adventures. It's one of those esoteric DIY projects you will either connect with instantly or won't. But if your cinematic appetite includes frequent descents into hell powered by lo-fi visuals, screeching soundtracks, and heavy doses of quirk and heart, chances are you'll be captivated by OBEX, as I have been.

How best to describe it? The film exists somewhere between an audio/visual experiment and a dead-serious LARP. Its approach to fantasy, fused intricately and marvelously with techno-geek ephemera from the late Eighties, is familiar yet unique. Birney charts a course from his nostalgic bric-a-brac aesthetic to a darker path by first establishing his unconventional co-leads — a reclusive tech whiz named Conor (Birney) and his loyal, sleepy dog, Sarah — along with their cozy domesticity that fate later steals from them. Tea and toast during the local news broadcast, backyard frolics, Conor's work (which involves crafting, during what I can only describe as a fugue state, vector portraits for strangers), more toast, movie night, and pre-slumber karaoke — the routine between man and dog is endearing. They're alone but complete.

Then comes OBEX. With demonic foreboding and a guarded heart, Birney — co-writing with music video director Pete Ohs — begins dismantling Conor and Sarah's happy life. It starts with Conor ordering a new fantasy game (which shares its title with the film). He submits a video of himself and Sarah so the developer, whoever they are, can scan them into it. It's all rather cute and innocuous, but once Conor uploads OBEX onto his Macintosh, he unknowingly creates a tear in the membrane separating reality from the game. Sarah is pulled into it, forcing Conor to abandon his hermitage and dive headfirst into the pixelated unknown to rescue her from OBEX's dreaded demon overlord.

Birney's touchstones are playful and warped — think Tolkien refracted through LucasArts, with stylistic echoes of Aronofsky's Pi and Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The fantasy peril Conor endures is as hilarious as it is unnerving, like the skeletons that tumble into bone piles after being poked by a magic sword or the skull-headed beast that lures him to the film's mad climax. Character achievements are unlocked for Conor during his quest, such as his first vanquished foe or taking on a companion (a walking, talking TV voiced by Frank Mosley). Through this, he reaches harder-won personal triumphs: learning to trust others, and to both share and hold onto the sad memories that have made him this thoughtful but isolated person.

In effect, Conor's vertiginous journey through the OBEX fantasy map evolves from a rescue mission into a glitched-out ode to home and hearth in whatever form they take, rendered in nightmare polygons and bursts of surreal tenderness. Birney wrings surprising emotionality through each peculiar encounter, never losing the humanity that aches just beneath his cerebral DIY aesthetic. In his quest to save his dog, Conor refuses Game Over as an option. It’s sweet, and it's exhilarating. By the time Birney's film reached its final stretch, I'd long been fully immersed in the OBEX experience; even though the adventure was nearing completion, I hoped for a 'Continue' prompt that would allow this story to keep spiraling outward, weird and wonderful, forever.

9 / 10

OBEX had its Chicago Critics Film Festival premiere at the Music Box Theatre on May 6.

Directed by Albert Birney.
Written by Albert Birney and Pete Ohs.
Starring Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Frank Mosley, and a really great dog.

90 mins. / Unrated. Features playful violence, though expect some full frontal.

MR. K

"Every human being is a universe within themselves: floating about in eternal darkness… aimless… lonely… so lonely… Or maybe it's just me." So muses Mr. K, the traveling magician turned existential navigator played by Crispin Glover at the beginning of Mr. K, a strange and strangely moving film from Norwegian filmmaker Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab. K doesn't remain lonely for long, at least not in a physical sense, as his travels lead him to a crumbling hotel with a chaotic guest list that seems to have filed in from the dream-nightmare scenario of Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. Mr. K's co-inhabitants are both friend and foe, passive NPCs and white blood cells out to halt the infection threatening their biosystem. Mr. K is more innocuous than that, but his arrival at the hotel, run by the prickly manager Mrs. Hum (Barbara Sarafian), stirs up trouble within its walls all the same.

Perhaps this is why Hum is so rigid about the house rules (no animals; no unruly, loud or drunken behavior; no music; no running or jumping; "and absolutely no pounding on walls!" she adds) — K's outsider status agitates the status quo. Despite her ironclad laws, early signs that K has already disrupted Hum's "respectable establishment" appear with the presence of a custodian lurking under his bed and a chambermaid stashed away in the armoire, both repulsed and fascinated by this new arrival. Also, and this seems important, something is wriggling in the walls, which, alarmingly, have shifted to keep K from leaving.

K, amidst frantic searches for an exit, eventually engages with the hotel's odd assortment of wastrels (costumed and made up magnificently by Charlotte Willems and Kaatje Van Damme, respectively), including a faded debutante named Gaga (Sunnyi Melles) and her bohemian coterie. He even makes a friend in the sous chef Anton (Jan Gunnar Røise), who genially suggests that Mr. K's predicament is more of an opportunity for advancement. To what? I'm jumping ahead: in his misadventures, K blunders into the hotel's kitchens, run by Chef (Bjørn Sundquist) and his daughter (Esmée van Kampen), who keeps more in the pantry than just vittles. As the kitchen welcomes K into day-to-day operations, he settles into his strange new circumstances, ensconced within the hotel's various minor dramas. Then, a new wrinkle forms: People are whispering that he is the prophesied 'liberator' come to free the hotel's guests from their seeming purgatory. "I'm just passing through!" he says, an increasingly feeble refrain.

So what is going on here? A mass delusion, a fever dream, a nightmare, or something beyond comprehension? Yes. Hints will reveal too much, but it's worthwhile to note that Mr. K sits at the nexus of Polanski's Repulsion, Jeunet's The City of Lost Children, and, yes, that Buñuel film I mentioned, a lively existential jaunt across the cosmic interior of the self. K's magic act is called "The Grand Illusion," and it's a good way to describe what Schwab accomplishes here, too; her film dances around sense with playful grace, elusive at times and comforting at others. One hallucinatory sequence just about sums it all up, when the hotel wallpaper peels from the walls to cocoon K, exhausted after his many attempts to escape it. This is but one of Schwab's several brilliant visual representations of the film's central paradox: the simultaneous, desperate urges to escape and to belong, finding serenity in the most unexpected places.

7.5 / 10

Mr. K had its Chicago Critics Film Festival premiere at the Music Box Theatre on May 3.

Written and directed by Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab.
Starring Crispin Glover, Sunnyi Melles, Fionnula Flanagan, Bjørn Sundquist, Dearbhla Molloy, Barbara Sarafian, and Sam Louwyck.

94 mins. / Unrated. Bawdiness and Cronenbergian squiggling ensue.

Our coverage of CCFF 2025 continues later this week.