Iron Lung (spoilers)

Created 1 Feb 2026 5:47 PM

I cannot stop thinking about Iron Lung.

It's good. I think it might be great. I think a lot of things about it, actually, and I figured that this blog might be a decent place to just blast out a bunch of things I think about it without trying to make it all fit together as a single cohesive article. So here's a grab-bag of random thoughts about Iron Lung, some bit, some small.

(Before I get to that; if you are for some reason reading this, haven't seen it yet, and have ignored the spoiler warning; I think it's definitely worth seeing, if you're at all interested in slow-burn horror.)

1. Progression.

   I love how we slowly see things everything change as the film progresses. The quiet, subtle way that the ship slowly transforms is probably the one most people notice (and one of the things I want to specifically pay attention to on a rewatch), but... I want to talk clothes.

   An ongoing thing in this film is the convict gradually undressing, peeling away the layers around him, becoming less covered visually as the character themself becomes revealed to us. That's all good, and also not that unique, a lot of films do this same thing.

   But I love that Iron Lung takes this and twists it by going just one extra step. He peels off a layer of clothing, then another, then another... and towards the end, we get that same idea play out with him peeling off those bandages, but this time it's not to reveal more clothes, or even skin, but the mutating flesh beneath.

2. Reframing.

   I thought this was pretty obvious, but when I mentioned it to my partner she hadn't considered it, so; in Iron Lung the game, the camera is (as far as I remember) never explained as anything but a camera, and the skeletons (and skeletal creatures) you see are seemingly just that.

   In the film, you start thinking the same thing... But then you find out the "camera" is functionally an x-ray machine.

   The Convict, and possibly the viewer, doesn't seem to put 2-and-2 together, but; this means that he can't tell if what he's seeing are bare skeletons, or living organisms with skeletons in. It also hits on horror imagery in two different ways at the same time; if the monster attacking at that time is a skeletal beast, that's horrific. If it actually looks different, but we don't know what, our minds can conjure all types of horrible things it may look like.

3. Hitting the beats.

   The music in this film is great. Movie soundtracks have to walk a 3-dimensional tightrope, where they have to be noticeable enough to appreciate them, unique enough to stick in mind, and yet (for the most part) meld into the background of the film so you don't notice how weird it is for music to be playing over everything.

   The Iron Lung soundtrack hits all this. The friends I went with all agreed the soundtrack was great. And it does, for the most part, avoid being invasive or distracting... except for one very deliberate, and quite awesome, moment near the end, where the main tracks in the music are, for a bar or two, replaced with the diagetic beeping of the sub, in perfect timing. Memorable in all the right ways.

4. Markiplier.

   My biggest concern about this film going in was; would I be able to suspend my disbelief, and see the character Mark was playing, instead of Mark playing a character? Aaaaaand... umm, mostly, no.

   But.

   Towards the end, I did realise that it was something I'd managed to get past (I guess until that thought); I had managed to stop seeing him as the Youtuber. It... didn't work all the way. I'm going to be charitable and just put this down to my familiarity with him rather than acting deficiencies on his part.

   Hmm. Actually, while I'm on that;

5. Markiplier, the actor.

   Man, I enjoyed Mark's acting so much more here than in The Edge Of Sleep.

   The premise of that show, and his character in it, did him no favours. Turns out, when you're portraying a character who's depressed and incredibly sleep-deprived, it's not a recipe for an energetic, stylistic performance.

   Iron Lung gave him a lot more to do, more range to explore, and I think he used it well. It definitely feels like a better expression of what he's capable of, and how he's moving past the "Markiplier" characters; you can see how he's improving when it comes to doing actual dramatic roles.

   There are still some bits (especially right at the start) where I think, if I had a magic film-making wand, I'd wave it to get them to do maybe a couple more takes. But, again; I'm way more familiar with Mark The Person than I am with basically any other Actor The Person, perhaps I'd feel similar if I'd watched hundreds of hours of, say, Robert Downey Junior hanging out before the MCU with friends and playing videogames before I saw him in Iron Man, y'know?