Iron Lung
Humanity reached out to the stars and the stars went away, whole planetary systems vanishing in “the Quiet Rapture,” the scattered survivors too few and with insufficient resources to continue as a viable civilisation, no answers to be found to the existential questions arising from the event but perhaps a clue to be found deep in the blood oceans of an unnamed moon, a convicted man sent below in an untested submersible.
His crime unspecified, too terrible to mention, he is welded in, the only porthole sealed behind metal to hold back the pressure, dressed for cold but finding the depths warm and clammy, the controls primitive and navigating blind, the only guidance from the hard copy map of sounding depths and the flash camera which illuminates the immediate vicinity for a fading moment, rocks and strange organic shapes like seaweed and the ribcages of sea monsters.
Based on the claustrophobic submarine simulation video game of the same name developed by David Szymanski, Iron Lung is a science fiction horror written and directed by Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach who also stars as the protagonist, in almost every shot of the long film, battered by turbulence as the pressure increases, his terse communications with the surface superceded by sinister contacts from beneath.
Promised his freedom should he achieve his goals, as is the nature of game adaptations cryptic messages are found behind secret panels indicating that he has been lied to, that he is not the first to enter the murky depths, the precarious relationship with his handler (Caroline Rose Kaplan) further eroded when he makes a mistake because information was withheld from him, clarifying what he is seeing through his camera but making his mission no clearer.
A survival thriller of an isolated man unable to depend on those whose distant messages guide him akin to Solis, there is much of the mutated DNA of Event Horizon and Pandorum, the convict alone but seeing things which should not be there, movement in the shadows of the Iron Lung, haunted by impossible ghosts as he explores blindly where no sane person should ever venture as the shipboard systems fail.
A suffocating body horror companion to Solaris where the only comfort is the acceptance of grim fate, Iron Lung is longer than it needs to be and capped with a trite countdown to salvation, a false optimism which doesn’t fit with what has gone before, but despite the limitations of the single confined set Fischbach manages to keep finding new angles from which to shoot his suicide mission into the mouth of madness, creating a disturbing film designed to be watched alone in the dark.
Iron Lung is currently on general release
