The first YouTube-spawned horror feature to hit theaters in 2026 (followed by Backrooms and Obsession), Iron Lung is co-written, directed, and edited by Mark Fischbach, known on YouTube as Markiplier. Based on co-writer David Szymanski’s video game, Iron Lung also stars Fischbach as a convict in a mysteriously obliterated future who is sent in a submersible to explore what appears to be an ocean of blood. At least 45 minutes too long (there are a lot of repetitive navigational elements), the movie nonetheless boasts an impressively claustrophobic, steampunk aesthetic (part Alien, part The Matrix). Its most ingenious bit of production design involves an onboard screen that briefly displays images taken outside of the sub. The convict has to press a glowing rectangle each time he wants to generate an image, revealing five or six seconds of blurry shapes, which he (and we) struggle to reconcile into something meaningful. Intriguing religious language is used to fill in the details of this world—it takes place in the wake of something called the “Quiet Rapture”—but that mostly devolves into gobbledygook by the climax. What registers—and what Iron Lung shares with not only Backrooms, but also this year’s It Ends—is the voice of a rising generation of filmmakers engaged in a new form of apocalyptic cinema. Floating in inventively imagined liminal spaces, these movies are bleakly confident that the end is nigh for pretty much everything we’ve come to know over the last few hundred years. And they’re deeply uncertain about what comes next.
(10/16/2026)
