Iron Lung

It’s hard not to admire the pluck and tenacity of just-get-out-there-and-do-it-all-yourself filmmakers. Although, pluck and tenacity do not guarantee great results. Sure, you might be the next Orson Welles, or Sam Raimi, or Robert Rodriguez. But you may also turn out to be the new Ed Wood or (shudder) Tommy Wiseau.

Perhaps these thoughts went through the mind of Mark Fischbach, aka videogame YouTuber Markiplier, when he embarked on this directorial debut: a low-budget sci-fi horror adapted from the indie game Iron Lung (by David Szymanski). We suspect he was just too damn busy to reflect, given the movie is written by Fischbach, produced by Fischbach, edited by Fischbach and stars Fischbach in a role that requires him to be in virtually every scene, mostly by himself, for the entire two-hours-plus running time. Vanity project or not, that’s an impressive act of Markiplication. If only he put out something as impressive as the effort he put in.

To be fair, Iron Lung has much that makes you want to like it. It has a grimy, grimdark aesthetic that favours practical effects over digital cop-outs, a Lovecraftian vibe that blends cosmic import with mental fragility, a fair helping of Cronenberg-esque grue, and some neat visual touches. There’s the bizarre, literally sanguine setting for a start, which supposedly required more fake blood than has ever been used on a film production before. Then there’s the novel way that Fischbach’s solitary submariner has to perceive his alien environment, via briefly glimpsed, grainy black-and-white still images, and nothing else. It’s an eerily restricted point of view the audience is forced to share, as Fischbach (and his budget) deny us barely any exterior shots of the sub, or the bloody moon it’s navigating.

The pacing throughout is leaden and monotonous.

But restricted-perspective, single-location, single-character stories are incredibly hard to pull off. And this ain’t All Is Lost, Locke or Buried. While Fischbach’s performance is solid, it isn’t sufficiently magnetic to hold the required attention. His script lacks the sparkle to keep us engaged, relying on non-zingers like, “This is bigger than any one of us.” His visual tricks (close-ups of droplets, close-ups of eyes, letting images go out of focus – presumably deliberately) quickly grow stale, while the final scenes descend into indiscernible visual anarchy. And the pacing throughout is so leaden and monotonous the effect is frankly soporific.

Essentially, Iron Lung is an interesting little concept, smeared too thin across a far-too-long running time. It could have been a cool short. Instead it is a patience-tester that’s hard to recommend to anyone outside of the Markiplier faithful.