Iron Lung movie poster, www.ironlung.com.
By: Lili
In March 2022, indie developer David Szymanski released Iron Lung, a short horror game originally released on Steam. It has a simple premise with more complex lore behind it: you have been welded into a small submarine, with which you are exploring the trenches of an ocean of blood. Just two short months after release, the game was picked up for a video by popular gaming YouTuber, Markiplier. He played through the game twice— once as released, and once after its ‘Lore Update,’ which added an interactive terminal full of world-building information. A year later, in April 2023, Markiplier made an unexpected announcement on his channel: he would be making a movie based on that game.
Well, almost three years later, that movie is finally here! It made #1 grossing film nationwide on opening day (with previews included), and its first weekend netted a total of almost 18 million dollars. That’s incredible, considering it cost just under 3 million to produce. But don’t just trust the numbers; I went to see the movie, and interviewed some of my fellow movie-goers– here’s what we thought about it.
To start off, I will concisely say that the movie was incredible. I went into this movie wondering how they could have possibly stretched a game that takes an hour to finish into a multi-hour movie, and I came out with my question answered. Longtime fans of Markiplier know that this is not his first foray into the world of film, having done several stunning “Choose your own adventure”-style short films on YouTube before, such as In Space With Markiplier and Who Killed Markiplier. Having some experience with these projects, it didn’t surprise me at all to see that Iron Lung was just as much of a hit as those titles.
Iron Lung makes masterful use of eerie lighting and uncomfortable camera angles to make the main character, Simon, feel simultaneously suffocated, isolated, and uncomfortably watched. The characters feel consistent and powerfully emotional, and I found myself fervently rooting for the main character for the entire movie. The people I interviewed seemed to agree, with moviegoer Trinity Edwards saying, “[she thought] all the actors did a fantastic job.” Even when considered as an adaptation of the game, Iron Lung easily hits almost every major note from the original game in a way that feels natural, probably because David Szymanski was part of the team that worked on the movie. Moviegoer Cameron Roberts said it was “easily better than the game” and that “during the first part of the movie, [he] thought we were just going to be watching a reenactment of the game”.
Unfortunately, no movie is perfect; Iron Lung loads a lot of its exposition into the opening scene, which could be a little overwhelming. And beyond that, the ending (although I won’t dig too deeply for spoiler reasons) was a little too vague for the tastes of myself and my fellow moviegoers. I was of the mind that the movie as a whole would be a little difficult to understand for people who hadn’t heard of the game, but in that regard, I ended up being in the minority, with moviegoer Eli Edwards saying, “[he] wasn’t terribly familiar with the source material and [he] enjoyed it.”
In short, although Iron Lung isn’t a perfect movie, it is still a very good one, and absolutely worth a watch if you have two hours to spare and find yourself on the fence. At the end of the day, Cameron said it best: “It was just a good movie.”