Add Decider on Google Where to Stream: All Is Lost Powered by Reelgood More On: YouTube Is ‘The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act’ Movie Streaming? Where to Watch ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ Episode 9 When Will The ‘Backrooms’ Movie Be Streaming? Everything We Know About The ‘Backrooms’ Digital Release Date ‘Backrooms’ Ending Explained: Do They Make It Out Alive? Barack Obama Talks the Power of Streaming and Sparks Viral Buzz With Aliens Remark in New Podcast Appearance YouTube streaming exclusive Iron Lung is one of cinema’s most compelling stories of 2026. No, not the actual story — an adaptation of the 2022 video game about a criminal piloting a submarine through an ocean of blood on a faraway moon — but of its making, distribution and significant financial success. One of YouTube’s most popular creators (followers in the tens of millions, view in the tens of millions), Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, directed, wrote, edited, starred in and distributed the movie, and surely reaped the rewards of its $51 million worldwide box-office earnings, a remarkable return on a $3 million budget. Fischbach’s fiercely independent production successfully gambled that his dedicated fanbase didn’t need to consume traditional marketing campaigns to be lured to theaters — and now they can stream it on his home platform all they want. Assuming they want to sit through the overlong, more-amateurish-than-ambitious movie again.
The Gist: They called it The Quiet Rapture: all the stars and every molecule of life from here to Zeus-knows-where was wiped out. Only people in spacecraft survived. For reasons we can only wildly speculate, a crew of humans hangs out at a distant moon that’s covered in an ocean of blood. Blood, eh? Whose blood? WOULDN’T WE LIKE TO KNOW. Anyway, the mission is to explore what’s under the surface of that ocean by sending a convict in a rusty peesashit submarine to poke around in the hemoglobin deeps. That would be Simon (Fischbach). They say he’s the first to do this, but they say a lot of things. He has to work some buttons and knobs and levers and eyeball green digital text readouts and use a sort-of infrared camera to take snapshots of the bottom of the sea, and although it will feel like we see closeups of all the knobs and readouts and squint at grainy blurry abstract photos for the entire rest of the movie, that’s not true. This stuff only eats up about 97 percent of the run time.
So in the sub we stay for two hours, hanging with Simon as he sweats in his seat, seeing things and hearing things, some of which exist and some of which don’t and you’ll often be hard-pressed to tell the difference. His primary communique is with a woman (Caroline Rose Kaplan) who barks orders at him and never answers his questions or is even remotely transparent about anything, which might’ve been helpful considering at one point the sub is hauled into HQ and Simon hits the camera-take-a-picture button and he gets his ass chewed out for not knowing it emits radiation, so hey, enjoy your cancer, lady, the only one you have to blame for that one is yourself. The camera never leaves the chamber of the sub, so we get glimpses of her and her real cool scar/mottled eye ensemble through a grubby blood-smeared porthole.
This is about when I might normally get into who this Simon guy is, but the movie doesn’t seem too interested in that beyond a few brief snippety flashbacks that reveal about a crumb of a cheddar-blasted Goldfish cracker worth of information, which is wholly representative of how Iron Lung belabors every plot point within a micron of its life. Simon finds a bizarre creature skeleton below the surface, Simon gets bonked around, Simon takes forever to come to, Simon finds clues that someone piloted this sub before him, Simon squints at his zillionth quasi-impressionist underblood photo and thinks he sees a monster that could be Cthulhu’s cousin. All this absolutely should not take two hours but it does, and we are deeply bored and annoyed.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The comparisons to John Carpenter’s charmingly done-on-the-cheap sci-fi cockpit comedy Dark Star are apt, as well as single-man/single-location high-tension dramas like All is Lost (although Fischbach is no Robert Redford, nor is he J.C. Chandor). Otherwise, Iron Lung has many of the attributes of a passion project that you want to admire for its independence from big studios and/or technical innovations, but struggle with its glaring storytelling flaws – e.g., Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or The People’s Joker.
Performance Worth Watching: The only real performance here is Fischbach’s, and it might be easier to overlook his lack of experience beyond Let’s Play videos if he wasn’t in just about every frame of the film.
Our Take: If I have to squint at another abstraction of a black-and-white shot of something that might be scary but never is, I’ll PLOTZ. Iron Lung consists of hundreds of meaningless shots and images, strung together in a vague and confusing manner. Just because Fischbach breaks the rules of the movie biz, and deserves applause for getting away with it, doesn’t obligate us to apologize for the film’s glaring flaws; the filmmaker’s greatest weakness isn’t his chutzpah, it’s his editorial instincts. This is a tedious clockwatcher of a movie that has an eye for repetitive detail and the yarbles to test our patience by holding on a real-time shot of tape slowly slipping off a damp wall. It frays your patience like a six-year-old in the backseat bellowing ARE WE THERE YET on a road trip to Mt. Splashmore.
Character-wise, it makes Simon yet another protag in a space (dotdotdot pause for dramatic effect) MADNESS story that draws out its drama far beyond tension until we sink into a naplike state. It struggles to efficiently communicate information verbally or visually. And while we squint at the screen trying to decipher some of its imagery, we’re forced to squint our ears at the dialogue exchanges between Simon and a garbled and glitchy radio speaker, forcing us to wonder if we’re failing to decipher important dialogue, only to realize, ha ha, there is no important dialogue in this movie. It’s just noise on top of noise.
There are only so many camera angles in this claustrophobic setting and Fischbach uses every one of them six times each. The set design and effects are impressively tactile though, the director channeling some harrowing Cronenberg influence into the big, messy ooey-gooey-glop finale. But grit and relative authenticity of Simon’s environment doesn’t make this story less frustrating in its inability to convey the hows, whys, and wheres of the plot, or who this Simon guy really is. We spend a lot of time with him and never get to know him. We barely get an inkling of the dramatic stakes until the very end when Fischbach drops them like a couple of cotton balls in a tempest, indistinct explanations shouted hysterically over an audio-visual din that would really like to impress us with its near-tidal wave of fake blood (more than the record set by Evil Dead in 2013, he said, pleasing the publicists). It’s amusing that Fischbach doesn’t seem willing in the slightest to apologize for how boring it is, but that’s as far as I’ll go in my praise.
Our Call: Touch grass, people. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
