Joel on Film

There is certainly a lot to admire about Iron Lung, an adaptation of the 2022 video game created by Daniel Szymanski, and at the top of that list is an adamant refusal on the part of the filmmakers to cater to any conventional storytelling mechanism. The descriptions of the source material (which, for transparency, only became known to this critic upon the film’s release) certainly suggest the translation was a solid one, because the skeletal story here follows a protagonist through a specific mission from point A to point B. That, generally speaking, is the structure of a video game, so we can’t fault the filmmakers for adhering to it.

The movie is also, clearly and admirably, a labor of love on the part of its writer, director and star, Mark Fischbach, known among online spaces as “Markiplier” and for his hours-long livestreams of video-gaming on a semi-professional level. That knowledge informs a lot about the general structure and vibes of this horror-thriller, in which Fischbach plays Simon, a prisoner convicted for his involvement in the destruction of a space station in a distant future where the human population has been decimated. Simon’s punishment is to man a submarine (hence the film’s title) to explore an ocean floor on a blood moon.

If that sounds mostly like a bunch of words strung together into the barest minimum of movie plots, well, it sort of is, and that’s where the problems of limitation arise. There is technically a plot here, as Simon discovers his entire mission may well be a sham, sometimes in devastating ways and at other times with the revelation of some twist. Perhaps the inherent problem of giving this movie a game-like structure is that the pauses to learn some new information feel a little too much like cutscenes, while the actions taken to eliminate the outside threat obviously stand in for gameplay.

It’s certainly a bold creative decision to commit to this type of storytelling mechanism, and as an actor, Fischbach also commits to a withering relationship with reality, especially during the chaos of a climax in which every effort to save himself and the day comes to a head in surprisingly grotesque and genuinely unsettling ways. That outside threat either is or is not a gigantic and monstrous being, which occasionally appears as a great skeleton and sometimes seems to be moving or even staring directly into the camera on the hull of the craft. A few flashes into the character’s past reveal—in whatever way they can—the devastating truth of how Simon ended up here.

It’s not exactly a story with an entire arc from beginning to end, though there is some sense of momentum to this mission and its goal, stated to Simon by a voice (that of Caroline Rose Kaplan) on the other end of an overhead speaker. Her message is not a hopeful or even helpful one, and the presence of it eventually grows ominous as Simon and we begin to question this character’s reality. For a movie in no hurry to make things happen for a long time (it moves with a deliberateness that might just be called “slow” by many, who wouldn’t be too far off), that climax certainly rushes to wrap things up.

That, then, is the inherent problem with modeling the sense of discovery of a motion picture after the sense of mission that guides most video games and almost certainly the one that inspired this movie. There is a difference between inherently knowing that a movie must move along a path to a preordained point and actively feeling the machinations of that journey. When a movie blurs the line between the two, the result ends up feeling a lot like this movie does.

Iron Lung, in other words, has a lot of interesting ambitions, proves that it possesses the tools to realize them, and then paints itself into a corner as it simply fulfills a cycle of predictable genre elements. Divorcing itself even more from the game’s structure might have been beneficial.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)