Iron Lung Review

I’ve heard of the game Iron Lung, of which this 2026 film is based upon, and I, like I’m sure most people, wondered how a one-location video game that takes most an hour to beat for most people to finish, could be stretched into a two-hour film. And the answer is that it doesn’t achieve that well — it drags. Even with an interesting concept here, you can’t make the mundane, which is interactive, be as engaging when you’re just in the passenger seat.

Mark Fischbach, aka Markplier, a very popular Let’s Play YouTuber, stars, as well as directs and writes this adaptation. He had previously done a Let’s Play of the game on his YouTube channel in 2022. I’m not sure how this game, of all the indie horror titles he’s played became the one he wanted to adapt, but it’s got an interesting prolgoue: the stars and habitable planets vanish, there are only space stations and ships, and now a group is sending a convict down into a deep sea of blood on a moon to see what can be discovered at the bottom, hopefully a way to save humanity.

Seeing Simon work on the sub, marking down co-ordinates, and struggling with his mental state, until you’re seeing these scenes play out for the twentieth time. And with little other character for Simon to interact with, we’re left to Fischbach to carry the screen presence alone. For a first-time feature, starring, writing and directing — he’s perfectly okay.

What annoyed me the most was that at times, there were elements interjected that weren’t part of the game. Characters on the main ship that’s dropped the sub into the moon’s ocean, and flashbacks to when Simon was a kid. All glimmers of moments that would have given the pacing of the film the breaks from the dull, tiered-down scenes of Simon doing the same things over and over again. But we barely get any of these, not enough to help it break up the pacing, and definitely not enough to help sustain the two-hour runtime. A runtime for a film with the least amount of meat on its bone I can remember watching in recent memory.