Iron Lung is a feature film from 2026 based on a game from 2022. I didn’t know about the game at all before I watched the movie. But apparently it has a cult status and a massive following. What I read up about the game is that it’s a pretty short game and that it’s supposed to be very claustrophobic and even depressing. But I haven’t played it and never even heard about it before. That’s how it is to be living in a cave without knowledge of the surrounding game world I guess.
Basically it’s set in the future where some kind of catastrophe has occurred. All habitable star systems and planets have disappeared and the only hope for mankind seems to be at the bottom of a lake of blood on an otherwise barren moon. A welded shut small submarine – Nicknamed Iron Lung – is lowered down into the depth with a single crew onboard, a convicted criminal who agreed to do the dangerous mission in exchange for redemption and for freedom.
So far, so good. The premise seems engaging and could, in theory, be highly catastrophic. Especially since there is no way to see where you’re going. The sub has been welded shut to withstand the outer pressure and the only way to actually see something is by taking photos of the outside environment. It’s unclear to both the convict inside the sub and to us what they’re actually looking for, but when he discovers some kind of skeleton the people on the surface get very interested and tell him that he needs to collect a sample at all costs.
But there’s also something else outside the sub, in the blood. This is portrayed mostly by sounds as the visuals only let us see what the outside though glimpses of the photos he’s taken. It’s a very shallow story but also complex enough to be interesting. The feeling of the unknown is something that has haunted us humans for thousands or even millions of years I guess.
And at first it works pretty good. My thoughts wandered all over the place trying to find a reason and what could be found down there. In other words, trying to figure out what it’s all about, if there’s a hidden agenda and maybe a reason for why the stars and the planets disappeared. But everything is kept in the dark. Our imagination might carry the story and the movie forward but the answers are nowhere to be found.
Now, that in itself could have intrigued me. I’m not oppressed by movies or stories where my imagination has to do the work. In fact, as I often say, those films are the most effective. But Iron Lung might be the exception that confirms the rule. It quickly becomes boring and what could have been claustrophobic becomes something else. It becomes a film where we soon realize that we don’t even care what’s going to happen. We don’t care if humanity ceases to exist. The pacing is so slow and the movie so unengaging that it actually feels painful to sit through all 2 hours and 5 minutes of it.
The more the story, and the director tries to engage us, and even scare us, the more uninteresting it becomes. There are far too much unexplained things going on. I get that the film is set in a future dystopian society but there should be a couple of revelations along the way and not just another mystery after another without even a hint to what’s really real and what’s in the imagination of the convict on the sub.
I was leaning towards the theory that nothing ever happened and that everything was in the mind of some future delusional person on the edge of insanity. But this is neither confirmed nor denied. There should be some kind of clues at least, something that convinces us one way or the other. Iron Lung was a failure to me.
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