The 2024 Oak Cliff Film Festival was one of my favorite weeks to be a film writer. It was a reason to be strung out all weekend in my favorite place and proof that I could put out content to match it, words burning out through my arms like air after a sprint on a cold day.

I didn’t make it to the 2025 edition, I was out of town focusing on a project that I dropped over the rest of the year, one that I’d made plans to restart this week, but my excuses kept falling away. My time off had to be rescheduled. Friends keep asking if I’ll be there, and I keep feeling awful when I say “no.” I tell myself I needed to save money. The past year, year and a half, it’s felt like every month would be my last, for whatever reason. What else am I going to spend it on?

I haven’t been writing. I don’t know why I haven’t been writing. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. Feels like I have nothing to say. I keep going to the movies, but it feels like I don’t pay any attention.

That’s a dodge. The real draw, what I really can’t force myself to miss, is the eclectic mix of films on offer. For weeks, I see the Texas Theatre advertising some bizarre, mysterious thing with no details and tons of buzz. The most mysterious of these is opening night feature OBEX, a retro-futuristic black and white film that screened at Sundance.

It’s one of those films that seems like a mystery box because no one describes the plot well – it looks like someone wrote a quick description for the Sundance program, and that got recycled verbatim in all other media about the film. Basically, it’s one half of an Eraserhead riff followed by a classic ‘80s adventure movie. The film follows Conor Marsh (Albert Birney, who also writes, directs, edits and produces), who lives alone in Baltimore 1987. He works remotely and his neighbor picks up his groceries, so his only company is his dog. He’s shown driving, but not where – these may be dream sequences. He sees an advert for a new video game, OBEX, that turns out to be possessed by a demon that kidnaps his dog. The adventure half of the film is spent with Marsh inside the game.

Birney is on-hand at the Texas Theatre to confirm this – not only is the film in two halves, it was two different productions with a year’s separation while they sorted out what the whole thing was about. Said he’s still sorting it out, that he’ll get interpretations from viewers and suddenly realize something about his sixth film that he hadn’t while making it.

It’s playing in the cramped upstairs theater, converted from what was originally a mezzanine the way old single-screen theaters have been doing this century. The seats are stacked almost vertically, and the house is so packed that people are seated on the stairs. It’s hot. I can feel beads of sweat dripping down my shins. Two other filmgoers come ask me where the nearest bathroom is in the middle of the movie. People are always assuming I work at the Texas Theatre, or maybe that I live there. I’ve stopped contradicting them.

Whatever OBEX is about, it’s powerful. It’s easy to tell it comes straight from the subconscious – Birney talked about several cinematic influences, but also the memory of moving to Baltimore in 1987 at 6 years old during that year’s cicada emergence and the effect it had on him. Cicadas are a major player in the film as the demon-king’s heralds, and it almost turns into a nature film for long stretches.

The film is extremely slow, and cinematographer Pete Ohs, who is also credited as writer, producer and editor, is endlessly creative with close-ups and odd angles to keep it energized. At the same time, it takes on that traditional slow cinema quality to it, where many of its images seem so shift shape and meaning as they go on. Josh Dibb’s low-fi synth score, which Birney also talks about at length and reveals was just as off-the-cuff as the rest of the film, comes in to energize many of the longer shots as it binds the film together.

I absent-mindedly pinch the blisters on my fingers from the poorly timed wart removal earlier this week, which left them at their most painful stage, and worry about the lump in the back of my throat that Google Images has convinced me is a goiter. Hopefully it’s life-threatening, and I can get emergency surgery without having to sign anything.

The theme of the festival isn’t eclecticism, it’s real movies for real movie people, and that’s OBEX. It’s transparently OBEX, the director is here telling us how his sixth feature was casually scatted out in two spurts. As we see signs of the monopoly-class film business slowly begin to crumble under its own weight, it’s these films, auteur-driven films that come out of someone’s mind instead of a boardroom, that have been sustaining American cinemas. In Oak Cliff, they were always the main event. OBEX was purchased by Oscilloscope at Sundance and will premier at Swiss and German festivals next week, but does not yet have a release date.