In Iron Lung, a convict trundles around a literal ocean of blood in search of … something. What? He doesn’t know. We don’t know. No one knows. But we do know that moviegoers will be exposed to swearing, violence, selfish behavior and around 80,000 gallons of fake blood. No joke.
Call the Convict lucky.
Sure, the Convict himself might argue. After all, he’s in a tiny, rusty submarine plowing through a literal ocean of blood—and that’s not the way most of us would want to spend an afternoon.
Still. At least he’s among the living. At least he didn’t literally vanish into the vacuum of space. Almost everyone else did just that.
They called it the “Quiet Rapture.” Every star, every habitable planet, just winked out of existence. Bummer, right? That left the galaxy’s apparent survivors—those “lucky” enough to be on a ship or a space station—rather perplexed.
But one can only ponder existential catastrophe for so long. Survivors gotta eat, y’know. So a few are trying to figure out what their “new normal” looks like, to see if they just might be able to rebuild civilization sans suns.
And plotting out that new, dim future apparently involves trudging around oceans of blood in rusty submarines.
The Convict, Simon, is alive enough to perform said trudging. And he has another thing going for him, too: If he explores a bit of the blood ocean floor and survives, he’ll be set free. Or so they say.
Imagine, freedom. He can go home and—oh, wait. Yeah, home’s not a thing. But at least he can surf the Interne—whoops! Yeah, that’s definitely offline, too. What about go grab a cheeseburger? Sorry, out of the question.
Still, the Convict is lucky, right? He’s alive. He’s got something to keep him busy. He’s got the dubious carrot of freedom hanging in front of him.
Alas, Simon’s luck is just about to turn.
Galactic calamities do not necessarily bring out the best in people, and a lot of survivors have just plain lost hope. But Ava—Simon’s boss with whom he communicates via a very iffy radio system—seems committed to at least trying to find a way forward. The mission, she insists, is important to humanity’s survival.
Simon’s very interested in survival, too: his survival. But he comes around to Ava’s way of thinking and he shows a willingness to set aside his own needs for a greater good.
Overt spirituality is pretty limited here—even though traipsing through an ocean of literal blood seems like a great time to say a prayer or two. We hear occasional references to the Quiet Rapture and hoped-for miracles. In a flashback, someone delivers a rousing motivational speech that feels like a barn burner of a sermon. (We don’t hear enough of it to know whether there’s actually any faith content in play.)
But while explicit faith content is fairly minimal, it’s not hard to put a metaphorical overlay on Iron Lung—even if that may be giving a film like this way too much credit.
Simon is a convict for a reason, after all, and he’s plagued by doubt and guilt over his past misdeeds. His submarine voyage could be interpreted as a journey of absolution and desired redemption, where Simon’s sins are potentially washed away (by blood, no less). Moreover, Simon’s trip can take on the character of vision and hallucination, where he’s tempted by unseen forces and tormented by internal demons.
One final note: We hear voices down in the depths of the blood. What these voices are, or were, is never fully explained—but in one stretch of dialogue, we hear a woman say that asphyxiation might be one of the more pleasant ways to die down at the ocean’s bottom. Another disembodied voice suggests that its owner came to a very cruel, wet end.
None, but we should note that Simon does take off his shirt once.
As you’ve already read—repeatedly—we’re dealing with a literal ocean of blood. And while we see won’t see a whole ocean’s worth of hemoglobin, the film apparently did use 80,000 gallons of fake blood—a new record, according to creator Mark Fischbach.
We see that blood drip from walls, spray through windows, flood through parts of the sub and occasionally drizzle from humans. Simon wades, wallows and occasionally submerges himself in the red stuff, which looks very unpleasant indeed.
That sea serves as home to what may be some terrifyingly large critters, and Simon’s submarine is occasionally treated like a large chew toy. During such encounters (which we only see from the interior of the sub), Simon’s thrown into walls, floors and ceilings, leading to a variety of bumps and cuts. He also suffers some (unexplained or barely explained) wounds on his hands and arms that require some serious bandaging. (Clumps of bloodied, used bandages litter a corner of the sub.) He also gets shocked after playing with a couple of wires.
But despite all the blood, the film stays away from true grotesquerie until its latter stages.
We see some sort of corpse-like being stalk around the sub’s interior (whether it’s real or imaginary, we cannot say), and he appears to be missing part of his jaw. Someone is wrapped up in inexplicable roots or tentacles, essentially locking his arms onto parts of the sub. When he tries to pull free, he does so at the expense of leaving his hand and arm dangling where they were.
As Iron Lung moves toward its finale, Simon looks worse and worse—his face, arms and hands mottled by boils and blisters. And at one point, a drop of blood hitting his forehead somehow creates a cut and sinks straight into Simon’s cranial cavity.
Simon’s fellow survivors (whom we only see briefly) bear their own disfigurations: Parts of their faces look scarred or melty. Simon doesn’t help matters when he triggers the submarine’s camera while the boat is still docked to the mothership. He doesn’t realize that the camera is a high-powered X-Ray (necessary to peer through all that blood, y’know): The resulting photo shows all of Simon’s compatriots as blurry skeletons and exposes them to plenty of radiation. The camera’s so strong, apparently, that it sends one of the characters straight to the ship’s infirmary. And when Simon apologizes for his photographic faux pas, Ava tells him to apologize to her tumors.
We learn why Simon’s a convict: He was found guilty of destroying a filament factory, killing at least 62 people—not including his co-conspirators. (Simon claims he’s innocent, but dialogue may suggest that this act of sabotage was just the latest bit of deadly violence that he committed.) In flashback, an explosion rips through, presumably, the filament facility, enveloping a man.
Through the X-Ray camera, we see nasty-looking beasties and the bones of other critters on the ocean floor. (Though given the fact that the camera is an X-Ray camera, it seems like one cannot be completely definitive as to whether those piles of bones are alive or dead.)
Nearly 40 f-words and about seven s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–tard,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused once.
None.
Simon vomits up blood. (Because there wasn’t enough of it already.) Characters lie and mislead.
Iron Lung is based on David Szymanski’s popular 2022 horror video game of the same name. Gameplay takes place entirely inside a midget submarine, and the goal is to explore the ocean floor, take photographs and survive as long as you possibly can. The game also comes with a handful of cheat codes: One opens up something called “Markiplier mode,” which replaced most of the game’s surfaces with the face of the popular YouTube personality Markiplier.
Well, Markiplier himself—whose real name is Mark Fischbach—must’ve taken one look at his eponymous mode and thought to himself, “Yeah, that’s fine and all. But there’s still not enough me in there.”
And so we come to Iron Lung, the movie—written, directed, acted, financed and distributed by Fischbach.
Markiplier probably should’ve saved his money. Because that little backstory for Iron Lung is far more compelling than the movie itself.
The film brings in the game’s grim, claustrophobic appeal—and stretches it out for about 90 minutes more than needed. It can feel like half the movie’s runtime is watching water drip from the submarine’s pipes, with another quarter of it taken up by closeups of Simon’s eye twitching. Arguably, the film’s most compelling fight scene takes place between Simon and a patch of tape.
Listen, I get that horror is all about the unknown, but there are limits. In Iron Lung, the viewer swims in an ocean of unknowables. What did they say? You don’t know. What did they mean? You don’t know. What’s that in that ridiculously grainy X-Ray? You don’t know.
And we’re not alone: Simon embraces all manner of unknowns in his quest for—well, whatever he’s supposed to be searching for—and does his best to add more. He looks at the sub’s operation manuals for a few seconds and quickly tosses them aside. Words, he seems to say. Who needs ‘em? Which I would totally get … if he was playing a game of Wingspan. But when you need to pilot a submarine through an ocean of blood? Yeah, I might glance at those instructions. Especially since I’d have more than two hours of runtime to fill and not much else to do.
It makes me wonder whether Fischbach and his cadre of fellow creators had a movie-making manual somewhere that they also tossed aside.
The content concerns aren’t as bad as they could’ve been—and for that, I suppose, we can thank Fischbach for spending all his special effects money on fake blood and nothing on actual, scary, limb-ripping critters.
But swearing costs nothing, and so we get a lot of that. Given that Simon spends most of the movie alone, it’s amazing how many excuses he comes up with to utter the f-word.
Near the end of the film, Simon really, really wants to get out of his prison of a sub. And in that respect, the film succeeds—because I really, really wanted to do the same. When the credits finally started to roll, I gave a word of thanks that it was finally over and left the theater as quick as I could.
Simon may have been lucky to survive the Quiet Rapture. But those who dare to step into Iron Lung? They are unlucky indeed.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
