Iron Lung

Interesting but somewhat incoherent
Adapting games to movies is hard, and this movie does this better than most. However, the game being adapted is a peculiar one, and it lends its air of peculiarity to the movie as well. It is a tight and spooky premise, and I am sure that if you have played the game you will get more out of it than someone who has not, but it becomes strangely rambling at times, possibly because the underlying narrative is so dense that the adaptation could not quite pierce it. It is a good movie, just a bit of a slog, at times.

Without a doubt a colossal waste of time. Unengaging, scattered writing and zero payoff at the end. We follow a convicted criminal's journey through unknown territory in a steel can with near zero context and simply follow a guy gradually losing his mind in the most uninteresting way, leading the viewer to absolutely nowhere after being absolutely everywhere all at once.

If anyone were to ask me if they should watch it, my answer is definitely more direct than the supposed "answer" in the movie: Hell no!

This time, it’s a “quiet rapture” that has caused mankind’s latest apocalypse, and so for the next couple of hours we spend time with a convict (Mark Fischbach) submersed in a vast and deep ocean of blood. He has been welded into a rust-bucket that has seen better days and with the windows sealed for his safety, he is informed of his mission only by instructions from the surface as he searches for the resources humanity desperately needs to survive. If he fulfils his task, he is to be pardoned and freed, but as his journey continues and his ship begins to fail, then truths he (and we) believe start to become blurred, questioned and compromised as his oxygen supply begins to run out and he can no longer tell what is true from what is hallucination. Now if you are a fan of claustrophobic horror, then this will be for you and Fischbach proves to be a decent exponent. Sadly, though, I just didn’t have enough context nor terms of reference to really get into the story - what had he done to earn this creaking entombment in the first place? That sense of isolation and the audio effects that augment it work well for a while, but after about half an hour I was struggling to remain engaged with his predicament or with this undercooked plot. It has an affecting intensity to it, but I just didn’t find enough happened and when it did, it was all too brief.

The film’s slow burn wouldn’t feel so staggering if it built to something wholly worthwhile. The blood, hallucinations, and sea creature are all great, but they’re too fleeting to make a lasting impact. Iron Lung promises something grand and cosmic, but its climactic reveal is abrupt, with few scares and only a brief glimpse of the monster. Ultimately, it’s two hours of tension that end in a bloody yet unsatisfying climax.

https://bit.ly/lungofiron