This article contains spoilers for Iron Lung.
This past weekend saw one of the oddest box-office victories in recent times. No, I’m not talking about Melania, the first lady–produced documentary that Amazon reportedly spent $40 million on for the rights alone, with an additional $35 million for the marketing. I’m talking about Iron Lung, a self-financed film by a beloved YouTuber named Mark Fischbach, who goes by the handle Markiplier, and who has more than 38 million followers to his name. The movie, an adaptation of an indie horror video game, had a budget of approximately $3 million—an amount that Iron Lung has already earned back seven times over, with a box office of $21.7 million worldwide. Markiplier’s secret to getting his passion project into an impressive 3,000 theaters? According to an interview with Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town, he tapped into his network of fans, many of whom apparently work at movie theaters, and who vouched for the film to their managers. This is one of the rosier byproducts of his years cultivating a relationship with followers through videos that are usually—though not always—about gaming.
I am neither a gamer nor a consumer of YouTube. What I am, however, is a huge fan of the use of fake blood, which Iron Lung has in spades—the movie reportedly went through 80,000 gallons of the stuff—and of self-financed science-fiction features with singular backstories. So I took myself to the cinema for a frigid Sunday-night showing, arriving right as the trailers ended. I expected that the audience would be minimal, based on my experience watching films in my small college town, but to my surprise, the room was packed with Gen Z–looking attendees, who were already seated. My audience clapped when Markiplier’s name came up on the screen at the beginning, and remained rapt throughout all two hours of the movie.
The story follows that of the 2022 game, by David Szymanski. In some distant future, all of the stars and habitable planets in the universe have vanished in an event called the Quiet Rapture. The humans who are left (those who happened to be on space stations at the time) have discovered a moon with an ocean of blood on it. In need of resources after running out, they have decided to explore this ocean, and have discovered something at the bottom of it that is a source either of hope or of terror. (This is one of many plot points in Iron Lung that’s ambiguous and is left, eventually, unresolved.) The remaining humans’ access to advanced technology has seriously declined, but not so much that they can’t cobble together a final try at exploration. All they’ll need is a pilot.
Enter Simon, the character played by Markiplier, a convict who has unwillingly participated in an act of terrorism, the stakes and politics of which are never fully explained. Dressed in tattered gear and sporting long, apocalyptically dirty-looking hair, the handsome young streamer looks suitably tough—think Daryl Dixon, but in space. At one point in the movie, Simon strips down to change shirts, and Markiplier reveals a cut chest with a weird futuristic holster on it that’s already inspiring flushed posts aplenty. (Markiplier has sold nudes on OnlyFans before—though solely of the type that past purchasers warn prospective buyers are “tasteful, no full frontal”—so this isn’t the streamer’s first rodeo when it comes to internet gawpers.)
Simon is offered his freedom if he allows himself to be sealed into an “iron lung”—a submersible with an interior boasting one room, I’d estimate about 10 feet by 20 feet, where most of the equipment can be found, plus a crawl space that gave me the extreme heebie-jeebies. This coerced pilot has no control over whether and when the submersible is lowered or brought back up—that’s at the discretion of Ava (Caroline Rose Kaplan), the commander of the crew of the larger ship, who’s in the movie mostly as a voice coming over the radio, with a few memorable appearances at the porthole, when the iron lung is brought up for retooling between missions. Simon can only toggle the up and down arrows to steer the craft, use the camera to take terrifyingly impressionistic photos of what’s outside, and try to hack into the onboard computer. (This scene, when Simon tries “password” and “password1” to get in, was one of the many moments during the film when people in my screening laughed out loud.)
Simon is, in other words, playing a game, complete with external constraints and changing objectives. At the beginning of the movie, he settles into the sub’s chair and starts to familiarize himself with the controls. The camera captures him from behind—broad-shouldered, miserably hunched—and I thought to myself: We are about to watch Simon do a Let’s Play, a genre of gaming video that Markiplier is no stranger to. That intrusive thought kept recurring as various obstacles arose and Simon’s frustrated reactions made my audience giggle. A Reddit user told the uninformed that Markiplier often “yells and says fuck a lot,” so it makes sense that people familiar with his other work would experience these moments of Simon getting pissed off at his situation as art imitating content. (One commenter wrote: “Whenever he was angry my immersion was immediately ruined because I felt like I was watching one of his Getting Over It videos.”)
But one should not imagine that Iron Lung will let you enjoy seeing Simon solve the problem of the ocean of blood. This is not The Martian. Instead, many of the things Simon tries to do inside the sub seem to have little purpose, and little effect. The movie uses the elements of the game to reach for something loftier: a cosmic horror, with some kinship with other outer-space-is-possibly-or-definitely-evil films, like Event Horizon or Solaris, but one in which you are never really sure what this doomed mission has discovered. By the end, we can see creatures in the ocean of blood, we can hear voices come over the intercom when the equipment is disconnected, the sub is leaking blood on the inside, and Simon shouldn’t be alive, given the state of his oxygen supply. So can his perspective be trusted?
Markiplier has created an unusual situation for himself. While still a relatively inexperienced actor in traditionally produced movies and TV, he carries all 127 minutes of the film almost entirely alone. This is the kind of boldness that having 38 million followers will get you! Some sequences work better than others, but to his credit, Markiplier does deliver the intensity needed at the end, when Simon makes a desperate and impressively gruesome sacrifice. (I will refrain from spoiling this, but trust me: You can really see those 80,000 gallons of fake blood put to use.)
Admittedly, the film is about 20 minutes too long, and I’m not the only one who wanted the plot to be 25 to 30 percent more fully articulated. But even so, my fellow cinemagoers sat through the entirety of the end credits, like dutiful parents refusing to leave the auditorium until the entire holiday recital has concluded. As I gathered up my coat, I was left feeling as if I’d witnessed the birth of something totally new. There are worse things for cinema than for YouTubers to spend their fortunes financing independent feature films. On Monday, one theater posted that Iron Lung got “wild turnout for an indie movie,” and thanked the fans who’d recommended that the cinema program it.
