‘Iron Lung’ Review: Markiplier Brings His Online Empire to an Unusual Sci-Fi Film

More interesting for the story surrounding it than for its strictly cinematic merits, Iron Lung is a film very much of its time—and, at the same time, a thoroughly strange and even surprising one. The first part has to do with how it exists in the marketplace. The second, with its form and narrative approach.

Based on the cult horror videogame created by David Szymanski, Iron Lung is a project conceived, directed, produced and starring Mark Fischbach—better known online as Markiplier. For most people over 30 he remains a complete unknown, but for teenagers—and for the now-grown audience that has followed him for more than a decade—he’s one of the most recognizable creators in YouTube history.

Markiplier became famous in the mid-2010s through videos belonging to the “Let’s Play” subgenre: recordings of him playing videogames, reacting to them in real time and essentially turning the act of gaming into performance. His specialty was horror titles, where the mix of tension, jump scares and exaggerated reactions proved especially effective. That kind of entertainment, still somewhat alien and mysterious to an older generation (mine included), turned him into a digital megastar. With around 38 million subscribers, he has the sort of audience power that allows a creator to negotiate brand deals, launch projects independently and—eventually—make a movie almost entirely on his own terms.

Because this type of internet celebrity still sits somewhat outside the traditional Hollywood ecosystem, he didn’t partner with a major U.S. studio or distributor. Instead, he handled the release himself, mobilizing his enormous online fanbase and turning the film into a genuine box-office success that reportedly grossed more than ten times its modest budget.

That DIY triumph becomes even more surprising once you actually watch Iron Lung. The film is a curious object—closer in spirit to an austere piece of European science fiction, or even something by Andrei Tarkovsky (it occasionally recalls Solaris), than to what one might expect from a YouTuber making a movie “for the fans.” It’s a murky, deliberately disorienting story that takes place almost entirely inside a single dark, tubular space, with Markiplier himself as essentially the only character on screen.

Its success, in fact, seems explainable mostly through the loyalty of that fanbase. If millions of subscribers are willing to spend hours watching him play videogames online, adding another couple of hours to watch him push levers, press buttons, argue with an unseen voice and confront a possible monster—perhaps imaginary—is hardly a stretch.

In the film’s bleak futuristic universe, Markiplier plays Simon, a prisoner held aboard a space station called Eden after a mysterious cosmic catastrophe wiped out every planet and star in the universe—and most of humanity along with them. The only survivors, apparently, are those who happened to be traveling in ships or stations when the event occurred. Simon is one of them, communicating mostly through intercoms with a couple of distant figures. His mission is to pilot what they call a “submarine” into a moon covered by an ocean of blood, mapping its depths and collecting data. If he completes the task, he’s promised his freedom.

What exactly that mission entails—or why it matters—is somewhere between secondary and difficult to decipher. Mostly it feels like a narrative excuse to keep the Hawaiian-born creator, who looks vaguely like a cross between Keanu Reeves and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, busy performing small tasks while fans watch. None of it is particularly gripping: Simon studies retro-looking monitors, interprets cryptic ultrasound-like images, presses old glowing buttons, adjusts directional arrows on screens and paces back and forth inside the worn metallic cylinder that serves as his vessel. We learn very little about the outside world beyond the fragmented voices crackling through rudimentary speakers.

And that’s roughly how the first 80 minutes of the film’s seemingly endless two-hour runtime unfold. The experience oscillates between bewilderment and a certain reluctant admiration: it’s genuinely surprising that a mainstream internet personality would make something this austere, opaque and slow. Unless you’re already a devoted fan, Iron Lung is capable of producing boredom on an epic scale. Yet there’s also something oddly admirable—almost courageous—about making a film this uncompromising and still turning it into a commercial hit.

The final half hour raises the intensity a bit. Through more dynamic editing and a score that leans closer to conventional genre filmmaking, the movie briefly edges toward something resembling a traditional sci-fi thriller. But it never quite gets there. By the end, the viewer is left confused—not only about the plot itself, but about the entire ecosystem that produces a film like this and allows it to make money.

I may be wrong—after all, until watching the film I had barely heard of Markiplier—but it’s hard to imagine that the success has much to do with the story, the form or the movie’s aesthetic qualities. My suspicion is that if the YouTuber had simply filmed himself talking and gesturing while staring at a blank wall, the result might have been profitable as well. This is less a cinematic phenomenon than a participatory one. Fans show up not only online but physically, gathering in theaters to experience the event together. The “product,” in this case, is the creator himself. Everything else is incidental.

In that sense, Iron Lung represents an even bigger gamble than it first appears. It’s almost as if Markiplier decided to test the loyalty of his audience by throwing the most deliberately tedious and enigmatic movie imaginable at them just to see what would happen. And he won: the film performed extremely well at the box office. More than a movie, though, Iron Lung feels like a hypothesis—a dividing line between those who understand and participate in this new creator-driven ecosystem, and those of us who watch from the outside, wondering not only what exactly we just saw, but what a phenomenon like this might mean for the future of cinema.