Iron Lung Or How To Make Your Own Film And Make Bank

Watching Iron Lung in a theatre is a surreal experience. For one, it’s unexpected to see a one-hour-long (at most) indie game getting a two-hour runtime on a big screen. And two, seeing celebrated YouTuber Markiplier no longer confined to a box on the top left-hand corner of a screen, instead standing life-sized as he gets thrown around in a submarine while literally playing the game he did a playthrough of in his YouTube channel around three years ago.      

This is a labour of love, three years in the making. Written, directed and starring a one-man army, Markiplier, aka Mark Edward Fischbach, Iron Lung was initially meant to run in a select few theatres in the U.S., essentially targeted at his dedicated fanbase. But now, it has slowly made its way around the globe. The film is based on the 2022 video game of the same name by David Szymanski, who is also on board as a creative consultant. 

Iron Lung (the game) has a simple yet terrifying premise, cashing in equally on isolation, claustrophobia and thalassophobia against a cosmic horror backdrop. Far into the future, after humanity colonizes space, the devastating “Quiet Rapture” occurs. It causes all the habitable planets and stars to disappear, leaving only those onboard space stations and spaceships alive in an endlessly dark universe. Hope lies in the discovery of a blood ocean on a desolate moon, looking to contain traces of salvageable material for humanity’s dwindling resources.  

You play as an unnamed convict piloting a windowless midget submarine on its last legs in the blood ocean. Your job is to navigate the ocean’s points of interest and take photographs of your findings for further investigation. Sounds bad? It gets worse because you’re in a sinking sub that’s falling apart while something deep in the depths stalks you silently.    

Iron Lung (the film) doesn’t deviate from the game’s setting. It merely attaches a name (Simon) and a very familiar face (Markiplier) to the game’s main character. Forced into piloting the sub, Simon needs to complete his mission in exchange for his freedom. He soon discovers that this isn’t a maiden expedition as he was led to believe, and his chance of escaping alive is looking about as visible as the last star that flickered in the sky before the “Quiet Rapture”.  

There have been a lot of video game to film adaptations lately, and Iron Lung is by far the most faithful adaptation of its source material. It captures the suffocating, isolating and oppressive atmosphere of the game, placing you in the scene with startling clarity. The cinematography, stylized in a gritty Eighties horror kind of way, further amps up the tension. The entirety of the film takes place in the sub, SM-13, aka the Iron Lung, and the set design nails it. SM-13 is a to-scale recreation of the sub in the game, right down to the monitors, the levers, the buttons and photographs of the blood ocean captured by the sub’s X-ray camera. The film also holds the current record for the most amount of fake blood used in a movie (300,000 L), which caused the lead actor to get checked into the hospital when it got into his eyes while filming.  

Looking at this film, you wouldn’t think that the blood sequences went through multiple iterations on a render farm built in Mark’s bathroom from old servers bought on eBay. But that’s exactly what he did. Visually, it has a remarkable amount of polish, especially for an indie film by a first-time filmmaker.  

It also recreates the game mechanics of stopping, taking a photograph to keep track of your location on the map, pressing buttons and pulling levers. This is where the pacing gets tricky. In a video game, where you control the character and must do everything yourself, it only adds to the tension and insurmountable pressure on you (and the sub). It’s there because that’s the gameplay.  

But in translating that to film, in an attempt to stay true to the source material, it stretches the runtime.
There are a lot of repetitive shots of Simon drawing on his map and piloting the Iron Lung around the blood ocean, which brings down the momentum. For an adaptation that’s twice the length of the game it is based on, it does feel like some of this could have been tightened in the editing room. In fact, it’s only from the second half onwards that the film picks up the pace.  

Iron Lung is a slow-burn psychological thriller where cabin fever sinks its claws into Simon. As the sub is lowered, Simon’s sanity and grasp of what’s real and what isn’t also begin to unravel. The game throws you off into the deep end from the get-go, and your mind is frantically trying to keep your character from drowning in blood, guts and all that gross stuff that draws from the lore. It’s just the right amount of world building to pull you in. The film, however, where you’re a passive participant, doesn’t elaborate any more than the game and for a viewer coming in with next to no knowledge of what Iron Lung is and simply looking for a cosmic horror film, it’s confusing. 

At times it feels as though the narrative is crumbling like the SM-13 and the plot is drip fed to you like the blood breaching the sub. If the mission is integral to humanity’s survival, shouldn’t the guy you’re sending down there be briefed on how to operate the sub?   

Simon’s motivations are also unclear. We know he’s a convict who’s been forced to pilot his own metal casket into a blood abyss. We know that wherever he ends up, it isn’t the surface. The little we know of his backstory is told to the audience through snippets of hallucinations as he slowly descends into insanity. Because there’s very little we know about Simon, it gets harder to separate the character from the actor. As a result, it feels like watching Mark in a real- life escape room based off a game. The film would have benefited if the world and Simon could have been fleshed out a little more instead of focusing so much on piloting the sub.   

But how did Iron Lung, an indie movie without a distributor, create a buzz big enough to become a global phenomenon?  The answer lies in the director/ writer/ actor’s popularity.    

Markiplier boasts a YouTube channel with a huge subscriber base of nearly 40 million. His original gameplay video of Iron Lung has racked up 16 million views. Iron Lung was supposed to get a limited theatrical release, but his fan base managed to reach out to the theatres to make it a global phenomenon without a film distributor. It’s amassed $52 million against an initial budget of $3.6 million. On opening weekend, it was neck to neck with Sam Raimi’s Send Help, and now the film’s phenomenal response has encouraged a worldwide release.  

This isn’t Mark’s first foray into filmmaking. He already did an interactive web series called Who Killed Markiplier? (2017), and two interactive films, A Heist with Markiplier (2019) and the Emmy-nominated In Space with Markiplier (2022) — All of which are more cohesive, condensed and simply not as confusing. 

Still, the film’s success ushers in a new wave of independent filmmakers: creatives driven purely by passion to explore uncharted territories and unconventional plotlines in an industry otherwise obsessed with popular IPs, remakes and sequels.