Iron Lung

I personally have no connection to either Markiplier or the video game Iron Lung is based on. In fact, I’ve never heard of YouTuber Mark Fischbach until now, and I don’t play video games. Writer-star-director Fischbach brings us a universe in which all stars and habitable planets have suddenly disappeared. There was not a slow trek to their vanishing point, just a mere snap, and they were gone, without explanation. The only humans left are those on space stations and ships that happened to be traveling at the time of the event, dubbed “The Quiet Rapture.” No explosions, no loud noises, just an instantaneous vanishing that beats out even David Copperfield’s greatest attempts.

We don’t see The Quiet Rapture while it’s happening. Instead, we join the situation already in progress. Our only source of information comes from observing one man who’s been welded into a badly engineered vessel, as others are supposedly trying to save humanity from extinction. Taking place on an alien moon, our main character, Simon (Fischbach), has been given the chance to earn his freedom by piloting a makeshift submarine into an ocean of blood in search of something, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be looking for.

“…Simon has been given the chance to earn his freedom by piloting a makeshift submarine into an ocean of blood in search of something, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be looking for.”

The terror in Iron Lung is almost undefinable. Fischbach doesn’t rely on jump scares, terrible CGI, or loud noises. He makes you work for the unease. Throughout the entirety of the piece, we see occasional drips of blood seeping in and rolling down the walls of the ship, along with some other, more transparent substance. The liquid eventually thickens until it resembles some sort of living entity, moving on its own volition. Simon’s only visual outside of the vessel is an X-ray camera that he uses to take still pictures of whatever’s in front of the ship. Why an X-ray camera? A regular camera can’t see through blood.

Simon eventually sees a skeleton of some sort, but it’s called into question whether it’s actually a skeleton when we’re shown an image that he takes of the humans outside of his ship when he surfaces. They, too, appear as skeletons because it’s an X-ray camera. So you have to wonder whether the skeleton in the blood is actually one? Or did it only appear that way because Simon photographed the being with the camera? To make it even more confusing, he eventually takes an X-ray of something that does not appear as a skeleton; instead, it takes the form of some sort of sea creature, complete with its own skin.