iron lung

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it's 1:22am on a saturday. i just returned from the 10pm opening screening of "iron lung", a sci-fi horror film made by youtube-famous let's player and creator of content markiplier, based on the eponymous game created by david szymanski. in said game, you control a person in the distant future who's convicted of some crime, and are punished by being sent to explore a mysterious blood ocean on a remote moon for information and possibly resource gathering purposes, all for the greater good of ensuring humankind's survival. to withstand the blood pressure, pun very much intended, you are welded into a piece of junk submarine. since there's no type of glass that wouldn't break facing these pressure levels, your only method of looking at your surroundings is taking a shit-quality picture using an x-ray camera mounted to the front of your sub. navigation is limited to using a map and the more or less sophisticated onboard coordinate helper system. the deal is a simple one: take pictures of some artifacts and you get your freedom in exchange. as you descend and start doing the job, you notice the onboard o2 meter, and it's dropping quickly. also, did that last picture you took look strange to you?

if this sounds like uniquely cool horror game design to you, that's because it is, and the developer made sure that it has impact without getting tired by making it a relatively short experience, around 30 to 40 minutes in length. it didn't really make sense to me when markiplier announced back in 2023 that he would be turning something that short into a film since the player is confined to a tiny submarine for the entirety of the source material, and there's not much worldbuilding outside of that or really any depth to the linear gameplay, meaning that they'd have to either really stretch out an at times thrilling-to-play but mostly boring-to-watch process - clunkily steering the submarine through a blood ocean as it bends and creaks under the ever increasing pressure levels while your oxygen runs out - or add a bunch of shit of their own which always carries the risk of deviating too far. the good news is that they didn't deviate which most likely would have been a catastrophe. the bad news is that they went for the former approach instead. here are my semi-detailed thoughts

hint: i'm about to spoil parts of the ending of the film that i consider to be minor

i was around for what i'm gonna call the "cry of fear" era on youtube where pewdiepie and a couple of select others, markiplier included, slowly started making a living by fake-screaming into a cheap microphone while playing horror games, so i found it somewhat jarring to see the self-proclaimed king of five nights at freddy's in an actual serious thing that i was rather spontaneously watching on a theatre screen. not only does he play the lead role and is therefore the only person on screen for pretty much the entire 2 hours of runtime, he also wrote the script and directed the thing. wikipedia also lists him as the sole editor which sounds dubious but worthy of a mention. talk about ambitious

the premise is still great. the pictures taken by the onboard x-ray camera are intriguing as they are pretty much the only window into the surrounding area that's shrouded in mystery, and them being kind of low quality to the point where you have to guess what you're looking at opens the door for some cool moments. the set design is authentic and made me feel giddy. the camera work felt mostly decent, although the amount of gloomy profile shots of markiplier was more than a little gratuitous. at the beginning, the submarine interior is shot in a way that makes it look almost roomy. towards the end, the angles make it feel significantly more claustrophobic as the oxygen runs out and the radiation poisoning incurred by using the camera works its magic. as time runs out, so does the available space. also, the last ten to fifteen minutes are absolutely insane as blood and strange flesh starts to engulf everything, including markiplier's body. at some point, the disgusting new meat layer he's developed as a second skin fuses his arm to a pipe in the submarine which results in a struggle for control over his body and ends in him ripping his entire arm off by accident. it's chaotic and feels like a sudden onslaught of things happening which starkly contrasts the rest of the film

speaking of the rest of the film: let's talk about some of the worse parts now

i didn't love the acting. while i do have to give it to her for putting in some energy, the primary loudspeaker woman, ava, delivered practically all her lines in a really obnoxious way that is both overly dramatic and amateurish. markiplier also does his fair share of yelling which a letterboxd reviewer calls the result of mistaking screaming for acting. it almost sounded like an anime dub at times, making it very difficult to let go of reality and forget that these are actors playing roles due to how unnatural it all felt. i'll chalk this up to lack of competence. you know how actors sometimes perform their lines by introducing a stutter to express shock or a similar type of feeling but that well-intentioned addition ends up making it feel less authentic? or upon encountering something confounding, they gasp or let out an "uh" to transport the jumbledness of their thoughts but it just sounds like, again, anime cringe? almost all of the voice acting in this film is basically that. it's honestly by far my least favorite part of the experience apart from the runtime, but more on that in a bit

another trope i don't really like is the main character talking to himself excessively in isolation. i get that it could realistically ground someone put into this situation, but it sounds stilted and once again reminds you that you're watching a movie made by people who are not that good at making movies (yet?). there's also a really annoying moment i can't let go of in which markiplier finds a supply cache containing a bottle labeled H2O and subsequently says out loud "i had water the whole time?" in his actor-y way, as if they wanted to really make sure that the audience was properly informed that H2O is indeed the chemical term for water

there's also some obvious fangirl bait going on, with markiplier taking his shirt off to nurse his wounds. it's fluff, but it's unnecessary, almost tone-deaf fluff when put in the context of the game. in my opinion, they should have kept the protagonist much more sterile and mysterious since he's not supposed to be the vessel that drives the story forward, quite literally, but that wouldn't work because at the end of it all, a major reason why many people are gonna watch this film is that markiplier is in it

all of that non-egregious stuff aside, there are two main problems with "iron lung" (the movie). one is the fact that it's way too long and probably should have been a punchy short film instead of a 2-hour long theatrical release. there's a lot of nothing going on for the majority of the runtime. the stuff they added to pad out the length is not tangible enough to justify them doing that. they try to introduce a faction that's not in the game to the mix and flesh out the convict's backstory, but both of those things are pretty much exclusively "elaborated on" through flashbacks that are so brief and vague and hard to grasp in nature that it felt pointless to me to even begin to care

the other major problem is that it's simply not scary. i'm easily spooked, and i took probably the least horror-proof person i know with me to watch it, so learning that it doesn't remotely manage to touch the eeriness of the source material was very disappointing. when discussing the movie with my friend afterwards who was not aware of the existence of the game, they reported a feeling of dissatisfaction after mustering all that courage to go to the screening, even calling it boring to the point of wanting to take a nap, and i'm unfortunately inclined to mostly agree. also, the genre is sci-fi horror, and with the horror being non-existent, the sci-fi part has to do the lifting, but it's not a solid sci-fi experience either due to being too barebones. it's just lacking so much in so many areas that it unfortunately completely falls apart for me

and yet, i'm glad that "iron lung" (the movie) exists. i find the willingness of a guy who's established in an entirely different sphere of entertainment to branch out creatively and try his hand at something he probably knows nothing about, purely due to his enjoyment of a random game he found online, very life-affirming, even if i don't particularly like the end result. assuming, of course, that this was made out of love for the game and not as a method of acquiring currency, but since david szymanski was reportedly tightly integrated into the production pipeline to stay true to the source, i'm gonna give markiplier the benefit of the doubt here. so, good on you, mark

if you're in the market for a good horror game, maybe check out "iron lung" on steam. and if you prefer watching someone else play it, here's john wolfe's playthrough

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath