‘Iron Lung’ Review: A Bloody Good Effort

Video game adaptations are all the rage these days, Super Mario drew in millions, and Sonic The Hedgehog is moving towards production on a fourth filming. But one game genre that seems to print money are the indie horror game adaptations, most recently proved by the success of Five Nights at Freddy’s and its sequel that released this past December. Now, popular gaming YouTuber Markiplier is making his theatrical directorial debut with his self-distributed adaptation of the indie horror hit Iron Lung. Read our Iron Lung review.

Released back in 2022, the game Iron Lung takes place in the far future after an apocalyptic event known as The Quiet Rapture, which saw the disappearance of all habitable worlds and star systems from the universe. The only remnants of humanity are those who were lucky enough to be present on space stations during the event. The main plot follows a convict who must explore and gather information from the depths of a moon with an ocean of blood while in a rusty, dilapidated submarine. The movie follows this basic premise verbatim, following the convict Simon, played here by writer and director Markiplier.

A single location film is a tough premise for any director, let alone one who is diving headfirst into their first feature film. And while Iron Lung isn’t entirely successful as a coherent film, it’s hard to deny that a strong effort was made on Markiplier’s end to deliver a worthwhile theatrical experience, one that has been given an impressive wide US release without a distributor through the sheer power of fandom; the entire film quite literally rests on his shoulders after all.

As the lead of the film, Mark delivers a pretty entertaining performance, though at times it was hard for me to fully disconnect his character of Simon from the online persona of Markiplier, but that isn’t really a knock against the film per se. The production design I found to be really great, the titular Iron Lung submarine feels directly pulled out of the stylized world of the game into our real world, and the movie shines when the gameplay segments are translated onto the screen. 

Where the movie falters for me, however, is in its bloated runtime, clocking in just over 2 hours. During some segments, you can really feel the movie’s length, with repetitive shots of condensation building filling up a good five minutes in of itself. In my opinion, there could be a really tight, much more effective, 90-minute flick buried within this. At times, it felt like the audio mixing was done poorly as well, making already confusing lore exposition hard to understand even audibly.

Overall, Iron Lung is a strong enough debut for Markiplier, who shows a lot of promise as a filmmaker. While I’m not totally in love with the film, it’s hard to deny that it was made with earnestness and passion, something that can feel missing in a lot of big studio movies in this day and age.

Iron Lung is written, directed, and stars Markiplier, based on the indie game of the same name by David Szymanski. The film also stars Caroline Kaplan, Troy Baker, Elle LaMont, Elsie Lovelock, and Seán McLoughlin. The film is now playing in theaters.

Thanks for reading this review for Iron Lung. If you liked this article make sure to check out more reviews here at Feature First