Iron Lung Review

[Mark Fishbach, Markiplier Studios, 2026.]

By: Mathew Manseau

Iron Lung is one of my favorite horror movies and does a great job of capturing the feeling of an unavoidable end.

Mark Fishbach, also known as Markiplier on YouTube, plays a variety of different video-games, primarily horror. Three years ago, he played Iron Lung by David Szymanski, which is a short 30-minute game. Mark loved the game concept so much that he asked Szymanski to make a movie, which he agreed to. I’m glad that the movie was well received, especially since it seems like more independent films are starting to come back. In the past decade, many big franchises have been ruining their reputation by using the same formulas or low effort reboots. On the other hand, a few smaller and low-budget movies have shone. 

Iron Lung is a psychological existential horror film. Humans are nearly extinct due to an event called the “Quiet Rapture,” an event that made all the stars and habitable planets disappear, leaving only moons and space stations. One of the space stations gets blown up due to a conflict with another station. People who survived were accused of causing it and were given two options: to either serve prison time or to help research a moon that is a sea of human blood. Main character Simon, played by Mark Fishbach, chooses to explore the ocean. Simon gets sealed in a poorly made submarine that gets welded shut. He has to find something that is of value to the scientists, and he will be brought back to the surface and set free. Although he finds many things under the ocean that make him question the true intention of the scientists and their research, he finds that there is something else alive in the ocean. He has to scan the environment using a powerful X-ray camera, which shows the area in front of him for 5 seconds and disappears while he maps out where he’s going and learns to navigate the rough environment with limited vision which was done well.

Some more things I really enjoyed about the movie are that the viewers feel the same dread that Simon does of an impending doom. Throughout the movie, there are so many bizarre events that happen and discoveries that flip the movie into many different directions. Another example is the sense of time. About 50 minutes into the movie one of the scientists tell Simon “We haven’t heard from you for at least 3 days” and it really does feel like a dream, the transitions and time skips are so smooth and feel like multiple hours were just minutes and it gets me wondering how long he was really down there for and what truly happened and didn’t happen. Many psychological horror films start off slow and ramp up near the end, but for Iron Lung, it goes from a sluggish and uninteresting start to a shocking and insane second half.

There’s not much that I didn’t like, but I feel like the world wasn’t used as much as it could be, along with the character development. There are so many mysteries and things that just aren’t explored, which would be very interesting to explore. It does make sense why they weren’t because I can understand Fishbach not wanting to stray too far from the game and add too much new stuff especially since the game wasn’t intended to be a 2 hour film. But it would be great to learn more about the scientists and how everything functions on the space station. Simon is a well developed character for someone who is supposed to be an anti-hero. While he is just as confused as the audience and isn’t designed to be special or have plot armor.

The production of the film was fantastic, and the movie broke a record. When movies are made the workers and actors are on the set for hours each day and they usually don’t have fresh food or high quality food that’s provided by the company, but Fishbach actually had lots of variety and tables of food and drinks for everyone to choose from and a lot of people working on set said that their treatment was the best they’ve had in their time of working on movies. Iron Lung has a lot of fake blood in it for the setting, but it actually broke the record for the most fake blood used in a movie, with a whopping 80,000 gallons, with second place being the 2013 Evil Dead movie, which used between 50,000 and 70,000 gallons. Mark Fishbach went to the hospital due to getting too much fake blood in his eyes as well. 

The movie was very well made and clearly has a lot of love and passion put into it which allowed it to be as successful as it is.