Iron Lung ★★★

Released: 30^th January 2026

Director: Mark Fischbach

Starring: Mark Fischbach

“That was incredible. I really loved that experience, it’s so novel, it’s so interesting. There’s not, like, a super direct thing that’s threatening you, it’s everything around you is threatening you. And it’s constant and pervasive. And any game that can create a constant and pervasive sense of death lurking right outside a thin metal wall is a pretty cool game in my book.” says Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach at the end of his 46-minute YouTube playthrough of David Szymanski’s first-person horror game Iron Lung, uploaded in May 2022. At time of writing, the top comment for the video reads “Who’s here after he just did an IRL playthrough[?]”

Indeed, the film adaptation which Fischbach writes, directs, edits and stars in, starts out feeling like watching someone else play a video game step by step. Enclosed in a small, likely-to-fall-apart submarine for the duration of the film, his convict character Simon is sent into an ocean of blood to retrieve an unknown object in exchange for his freedom. There’s little room for the camera, yet Fischbach appears to try and place it everywhere, capturing every detail of activity around the sub in a series of gradually frustrating extreme close-ups spoon-feeding information which could be conveyed in one shot. It’s less claustrophobic and more cramped.

Once contact is lost with the people who sent him on this mission (largely represented by Caroline Rose Kaplan’s Ava), among the last humans alive in a universe on the edge of extinction, the threats lurking outside the sub which unnerved Fischbach so much during that first playthrough come into play.

Travelling off map, Simon keeps coming across a giant, beast-like skeleton, seen through the sub’s x-ray camera. From there the creeping noises surrounding the ship, and sometimes inside it, start to play on his mind. As an isolation survival thriller Iron Lung finds its stride. There’s a pacy race against time as oxygen depletes against the unfolding mysteries, including that of another possible ship on the thought-desolate moon.

Moving away from simply steering to specified coordinates, Fischbach’s lead forces a more engaging path. Additionally, he appears to grow confidence and director and editor once getting into the things he truly loves about the game. As if the build-up before losing contact is simply an extended tutorial. While blood might start to leak in, the confined location feels less limiting as the outside ocean is broadened, at least narratively.

It’s been claimed that Iron Lung now holds the world record for most fake blood used in a film (with 300,000 litres, beating 2013’s Evil Dead by 110,000) and its use has as much an effect outside the ship as it does filling up the inside. Brief visions come into play, alongside some lightly used but still enjoyably gnarly body horror, leaning into the dark sci-fi edges of the film as the screen fills with red and flashes of possible otherworldly beats.

Much of this arrives in the film’s second half where ideas start to play out more alongside each other with greater urgency. Growing the panic of the lone sub pilot and the survival basis that forms much of what he faces; whether it be an effect of depleting oxygen or a cover-up by those who arrested him in the first place – for a crime he claims he didn’t commit.

Things may not quite be as propulsive as perhaps hoped, but as the blood flows the tension rises. Iron Lung finds itself in the panic of facing a ticking clock counting down to, and against, the unknown. It may not be a fully immersive watch, although it certainly gets across the isolation of being stranded and pure discomfort of the blood as it goes from oozing to pouring, but it’s certainly engaging as it grows in confidence the more Fischbach’s love for the game and its lurking potential for fear come through.