Iron Lung

This post will have spoilers!!! If you have not seen Iron Lung yet then I suggest you hold off on reading this until you have. You have been warned!

I will also preface this by saying that when I have written movie reviews in the past, I usually watch them twice. Once to enjoy it, and once to analyze it. Because this just came out today (and I wanted to jump on it right away) I haven’t had a chance to watch it again yet so my recollection of the details might not be as sharp as I would like. 

Last night, I went to a premier screening of Markiplier’s Iron Lung. If you are not a gamer or someone who watches content creators you may not know who this is but you have probably at least heard the name even if it meant nothing to you. To be honest, I am not a big Markiplier fangirl, I like his content well enough but he isn’t one of the creators I watch ALL the time.

Markiplier is a gamer/streamer/content creator who is most well known for “let’s play” type videos and particularly for indie horror games. He is also a talented actor and film maker, two skills that are beautifully displayed in the recent release of his new indie movie, Iron Lung. 

Iron Lung, the movie, is based on the indie horror game of the same name, created by David Szymanski. Now, I never played the game and I don’t think I actually ever saw any play-throughs on it even though I do watch quite a lot of indie horror “let’s plays”, so I went into this movie with extremely limited backstory. Iron Lung is an indie horror game where you play as a convict who is trapped in a submarine that is sent down into an ocean of blood to look for something- you don’t know what. Basically, this is a universe where humans have travelled space and colonized other planets. There was some sort of cataclysmic event that wiped out… well, everything. All stars and planets with habitable life simply vanished, only space stations and artificial structures remained. But moons of blood, human blood, appeared. The very few humans that are left are fractured into warring groups as they all try to find answers and ways to survive. You, the player, are a convict that has been captured by one of these factions and your sentence to earn your place in their society is to be sent down in this submarine to explore the blood ocean on one of these moons. 

In the submarine, the only view you have of the outside world is with snapshots produced by an x-ray camera. As you travel to different locations, you take pictures with the xray and sometimes you get really unsettling images of skeletons… or monsters. 

That was my knowledge going in. I was also aware that this movie has been described as a “slow-burn” which I think was an important primer as so many movies these days are designed to appeal to the instant gratification addicted brains of modern society. If you go into this expecting high action and tense excitement right from the get-go you might find yourself bored. There is plenty of high-stakes excitement in this movie but it is, first and foremost, a suspense horror. Also a psychological horror. It was actually extremely refreshing for me, as a horror enjoyer, to see that the entirety of this movie relied on the context to create the sense of fear and dread rather than turning to cheap jump scares. Iron Lung is, in its own right, a terrifying concept. No jump  scares needed.  

The movie takes place entirely inside the submarine where the convict (Markiplier) is serving his sentence. We learn, over time, that he was merely a survivor trying to find any sort of livable society and got caught up in the various factions’ squabbles. He was captured by the Consolidate after some sort of interaction between them and his previous faction resulted in an explosion that killed many people. As the convict explores the bloody depths he discovers a skeleton of some monstrous creature that the Consolidate back on the surface are intensely interested in. We don’t know what they are searching for but the urgency in their voices when anything is discovered suggests that they already know there is something very important down there, somewhere. 

With each new discovery, the consolidate asks for more and continuously pushes the convict to do one last task before they bring him up, eventually promising that if he retrieves valuable data from a previous sub he found destroyed, then he would be free. All the while, we see the convict struggling with his guilt and his mind unraveling in the isolation and uncertainty of his sentence. 

All the while as well, we see more and more degradation of the submarine. Blood slowly leaking in, vein-like structures beginning to grow across surfaces, and even the convict’s own skin being infected by the hostile environment. 

As his sanity deteriorates, the convict experiences more and more visceral interactions with the blood moon, eventually even experiencing a lovecraftian god-like hallucination, or perhaps, an exchange, with the alien life form of this horrific environment. Despite his questionable mental state, the convict manages to secure the data and with his final actions, he wraps the precious black box in a lifejacket, believing that it will make it to the surface when his sub is torn apart by the monsters in the blood. 

In the end, we are left with more questions than answers, and to me, that is a much more satisfying ending for this story, than any sort of resolution. 

This was really a fascinating and engaging movie. In a time where so many horror movies are just the same thing over and over again, a unique story that plays on suspense, psychological horror and lovecraftian cosmic horror, is an amazing accomplishment!

I may be biased as I am quite a fan of lovecraftian horror and though I haven’t actually seen that term applied to this movie or game, that is definitely the feeling I got from it. 

There is something just innately horrifying about beings so much greater than ourselves. Humans live comfortably in the knowledge that we are the dominant species of Earth and there is very little in the natural world that is an actual threat to us. We step over ants every day without even noticing it most of the time. But what if we were the ants to something incomprehensible to ourselves? What if that incomprehensible greatness decided to play with a magnifying glass some day? Because it was bored, our entire existence was destroyed, and it didn’t care or even really notice. How small and insignificant are we? 

That is the discomfort behind lovecraftian horror. We don’t know if that is the sort of thing that is going on with the blood moons but it is suggested that whatever is there, if it even exists, was responsible for “the Quiet Rapture” of humanity and all other known life. 

I have no idea what the budget was for this movie but I imagine the limited set and character interactions probably kept costs a little lower and allowed for a unique and intimate exploration of the mind in such isolation. I did read, however, that this movie has the most fake blood of any movie, at over 80,000 gallons! 

I am also seeing that the opening night screenings on Jan 29th brought in 3.5 million dollars! I hope that is good compared to budget and I would love to see this movie do well and encourage Markiplier to take on more large film projects like this. 

Honestly, all I can think now, after seeing the movie and thinking a little bit on the sci-fi cosmic horror and psychological horror, is how badly I want Markiplier to make Mouthwashing into a movie!!