IRON LUNG Review: The Most Immersive Reaction Video Ever Made

Not so long ago, it was really not very fun to watch someone else play a video game.

Whether it was your sibling, your cousin or your pal, the pained cries of "Mom says it's my turn on the Xbox" would fall on deaf ears. But in our lifetimes, we've seen a shift.

Suddenly, sitting back and letting someone else do the heavy lifting with a controller has become loved by millions, especially when the ones doing it are wacky, amiable and tireless internet personalities on the edge of an amusing nervous breakdown.

At the top of the pile is Mark Fischbach, or Markiplier to his 38.2 million subscribers, whose love for vidya of all kinds has led him to unprecedented success, being the first person to make an immersive adaptation of his own playthrough of a particular game that actually functions as a major motion picture. From an initial curious reaction-video to a full-blown box office sensation, Markiplier's love story with David Szymanski's Iron Lung is an unruly and exciting tango with the unknown in almost every respect, upgrading him from lucrative streamer to actor, director, writer, producer and editor, all for the very first time.

The game and film share the same portentous set-up: a cosmic heat-death has struck the
universe, extinguishing stars and snuffing out planets, bearing the name 'the Quiet Rapture'. The last remaining souls are scrabbling to understand its secrets, and find themselves on a moon covered in an ocean of blood, a horrifying biological phenomenon into which the eponymous rickety submarine 'Iron Lung' is launched.

The player and main character are also the same: Mr. Fischbach (or Mr. Iplier) is Simon, the hapless and inexperienced pilot of the craft whose job is to traverse the literal bloodbath's trenches for traces of...something. Welded inside and running out of oxygen at an alarming rate, Simon's odyssey into the uncharted horrors at the end of everything becomes a race against time, not only to survive until the next hour, but for all life as we know it.

Iron Lung as a concept hinges entirely on its commitment to claustrophobia. The bookending images are the only respite we get from the dank interior of the sub, and the audience's sentence is as grueling as Simon's: endure this for as long as you can and feel the stress of not being able to move an inch.

Fischbach keeps the design of the Lung faithful to the game, creating a scrupulous but accessible visual language through the controls and low-fi tech that keeps a tight hold on the stakes and tension. The directional panels couldn't be cheaper if they tried, simply a series of latitude and longitude digits next to a compass interface, creating a terrible sense of desperation as soon as you lay eyes on the thing.

At the rear, there's an X-ray camera to help Simon figure out what the hell is outside and what keeps knocking (and chomping) on the hull. This is where Szymanski's and Fischbach's minds meld the best, with each flash conjuring a gorgeously eerie image that resembles a HR Giger painting blasted by a solar flare; keeping the obfuscated sights of the outside world coming at a regular pace gives the film its best scares, and recalls the sustained terror of something as simply scary as Skinamarink (another runaway indie success made with next-to-no money).

As the vessel begins to fail, the beleaguered Simon, Fischbach cracks his knuckles and gets to work with keeping familiar sights fresh. There's a stretch in the second act that is practically a clinic on how to hook in your audience while showing them little more than a crawlspace and a crack of light, sinking the atmosphere further into unmitigated dread while discovering a new palette for the drama. The rusty reds of the first half are mixed in with inky blacks and harsh blues in the second, building to a retina-burning finale that escalates the sensory discomfort to outrageously disgusting heights.

For all it's nice to see Fischbach construct a tactile world for his film, its real glee is in breaking the record for most fake blood ever used in a movie, surpassing the already-impressively wet, soggy and very, very red finale of 2013's Evil Dead with a gonzo sequence that feels like a lunatic wish fulfillment fantasy for someone who has never played a lead character before.

To say Fischbach puts himself through his paces is putting it mildly, almost entirely shouldering the film by himself from panicked freakout to gritted teeth determination with admirable range for a first-timer. There's no escaping that much of the dialogue sounds exactly like a video game, with expository voices from above giving commands and hints about how the narrative can be progressed. Working against this, Fischbach's Simon does initially feel like a blank slate searching for a personality, yet spending time in such a small space with him eventually puts him in a heroic mold that, say, a young Kurt Russell would have thrived in.

An impassioned series of voice artists supporting him from the other end include a brief appearance by industry legend Troy Baker and a hugely engaging Caroline Rose Kaplan as Simon's impatient handler Ava, and the combative chemistry between characters on and off-screen is conveyed strongly to keep the drama high. Admittedly, Fishbach doesn't make it easy on himself in that regard; running at 127 minutes, this makes Iron Lung's welcome almost impossibly arduous as a one-room drama, and it's a minor miracle that the longueurs are smoothed out by its well-placed hallucinatory breaks and horrifying glimpses at the eldritch evil lurking inches away. Its idiosyncratic length may look undisciplined on paper, as any film from an overly-cautious studio would've hacked this apart into an 80 minute sizzler; as it stands, it's a slow cooker set to low for as long as the meat will allow before it begins to disintegrate.

And that is perhaps the greatest achievement of Iron Lung, an indulgence of an adaptation that shouldn't work...but it does. Fischbach's independent undertaking of every aspect of the film, from writing its expanded backstory to supervising its marvellous CGI (when the horror escalates, it does so with scale and detail that most big budget blockbusters can't even scrape) and eventually brokering deals with cinema chains for surprisingly widespread release.

Only a handful of days after its release, it's clear this has paid dividends, catching nigh-on impossible lightning in a bottle and becoming the number one movie in the US in a January populated by other horror heaters; if you had bet on this beating the new Sam Raimi and a killer monkey film that had been advertised for months in advance, you would be a very rich person indeed. [Note from editor: preliminary totals show that the film ended up #2 in North America, per Variety; still very impressive!]

Fischbach's passion for this voyage has been evident for a long time, and while he owes somewhat of a debt to classic sci-fi that has come before him (there's a lot of Dark Star to the constricted production design, and he cannily lifts a gorgeous image from Silent Running), his ingenious and uncompromising approach to turning an engaging playthrough into a white-knuckle cinematic experience is something that can be called a true original, unbeholden to conventions of duration, collaboration or self-conscious discipline.

There's not a lot else out there like Iron Lung, and it provides a strange, off-kilter hope for the future of indie filmmaking in an age where studios are fading and audiences are shifting: a 'quiet rapture' for the box office of old, if you will.

The film is now playing, only in movie theaters. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.