This weekend brings us two different blood-soaked horror movies with anti-capitalist themes, minimal casts, and claustrophobic settings. Buckle up, gentle readers — it’s time for a double feature!
Iron Lung comes to us from Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, a YouTuber known for playing and reacting to various video games. (He was one of many YouTube personalities invited to cameo on Five Nights at Freddy’s, but turned it down because he was busy with this picture.) Appropriately, he’s here making his writing/directing/acting/producing feature debut with an adaptation of an indie horror game.
Sam Raimi, on the other hand, needs no introduction. He’s spent the past several decades finely honing his uniquely sadistic brand of horror/comedy, with a predilection for torturing his protagonists in every cartoonishly psychotic way possible. And now he’s made a movie about two people stranded together on a desert island. Joy.
Iron Lung opens after an apocalyptic event called the “Quiet Rapture”. The stars have all gone dark, the entire world is a vast ocean of blood, and humanity is on the verge of extinction. So naturally, the corporation serving as the de facto government is scouring the ocean floor looking for any last vestige of humanity that might be useful. Never mind the eldritch demons swimming around down there.
Markiplier plays Simon, a convicted killer who got conscripted into one of these diving expeditions. In an experimental submarine, no less. Aside from a couple of brief shots at the very beginning and end, the entire movie is set inside a submersible that’s roughly the size of a parking space. Simon is literally welded inside of there and sent into an ocean of blood, supposedly just to see what can be found.
Oh, and did I mention that Simon can’t see outside? Yeah, the porthole can’t withstand the pressure, and it’s not like Simon could see through a solid ocean of blood at any rate. All he’s got are a set of vague proximity warnings and an X-ray camera that only takes one still image at a time. And for whatever reason, the camera button and the engine controls are on opposite ends of the room.
The premise for Send Help is much more straightforward. Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a put-upon middle manager who’s spent several years working wonders at her accounting strategy and planning job, but she never gets the praise and promotions she’s due because she’s socially awkward. Contrast that with Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) the superficial, self-centered, pampered asshole who lucked into the CEO position after his dad died. (His dad is the customary Bruce Campbell cameo, by the way.)
Things change in a big way when a business trip goes catastrophically wrong. Linda and Bradley are the sole survivors of a plane crash and they wash up on a deserted island somewhere off southeast Asia. The kicker is that Bradley has a busted leg and delusions of grandeur, while Linda has spent the past several years studying to try and get on “Survivor”. Hilarity ensues.
Right off the bat, from start to finish, Send Help is such a Sam Raimi movie that it’s physically painful. Off the jump, we’ve got a hapless protagonist surrounded by one-dimensional bullies who take psychotic delight in abusing her at every opportunity in every conceivable way. And right there at the top of the dogpile is Bradley, an eminently hateable corporate executive parody. Thus Linda’s suffering brings character growth and satisfying drama while Bradley’s suffering brings amusement through schadenfreude.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that the world-building in both movies is shit. The characters, their drama, the companies they work for, all of it is far too heightened to register as anything authentic or fleshed-out. Then again, it’s not like we really need much to understand the greater thematic point about expendable laborers and their abuse at the hands of corporate overlords.
Unfortunately, the crappy world-building is a much bigger problem in Iron Lung. Because it’s such a higher concept and there seems to be so much more relevant activity going on in the background.
We don’t know anything about the apocalypse. We don’t know anything about the monsters under the blood sea. We don’t know anything about whatever Simon was sent down to find and/or recover. Granted, it’s a rather significant part of the story that Simon is deliberately kept in the dark, so a lot of that is by design. But even when the characters go on about the Consortium and Eden and Filament Station and all this other backstory, it’s all word salad to me.
The good news is that everything inside the sub works surprisingly well. The atmosphere is dripping with suspense, the production design is marvelous, and it’s genuinely impressive how the camerawork and editing keep ratcheting up the tension with so many close-up shots of the various instruments. I might add that this film reportedly set a new record for the amount of fake blood used in a feature film (over 300,000 liters!), and a movie set in a submarine that gradually breaks down in a literal ocean of blood will indeed be tough to beat.
But of course we’re talking about Sam Raimi here. He can’t compete with Iron Lung in terms of sheer volume, but he’s vastly more skilled at knowing exactly how much blood to use and where and when. And of course it wouldn’t be a Sam Raimi picture without vomit and other bodily fluids mixed in for good measure. All of this adds up to some masterfully gruesome fight scenes, like that show-stopping brawl with a wild boar.
I know absolutely nothing about the source material for Iron Lung, yet the slavish devotion is so apparent that I can innately tell how perfectly the game was translated. Through so much of the movie, it’s like Simon is actually playing a game. He’s experimenting with the knobs and levers, gathering clues with the camera, painstakingly mapping out the ocean floor on a massive piece of graph paper. In so many ways, the character develops and grows stronger as he gets better at playing the game. It’s such a blindingly obvious solution to adapting a video game into a narrative medium, I don’t know if it could’ve worked with a game that wasn’t so simple.
By comparison, Send Help shows the development of its characters through their mastery of surviving on the island. Sure, Linda starts out with an inherent advantage, but it’s still neat to watch her find new skills and craft new stuff. Even better, every time Bradley listens to Linda long enough to learn something new, it’s a sign that he could potentially be growing and changing into a redeemable person. I need hardly add that as the film shows the characters learning and making use of their survival skills, we the audience get the satisfaction of feeling like we’re learning something practical.
But then of course we have everything else happening in the sub of Iron Lung. We’ve got the psychological horror of a man stuck alone at the bottom of the sea, pursued by horrific monsters he knows nothing about and can’t see, with no other company but voices that drift in and out through an unreliable radio. On top of that, we’ve got the suspense that comes from being a disposable convict on a suicide mission, at the mercy of unknowable corporate bureaucrats who won’t tell him anything.
Put simply, the poor guy is losing his mind. He’s a paranoid wreck, slowly and steadily losing all sense of what’s real. And in a movie that starts out with such an absurdly high concept, the sky’s the limit as to what could potentially be true or false.
There’s a bit of that with Send Help, but not as much. We do get one memorable dream sequence, mostly as an excuse for Raimi to get a zombie jump scare in the movie somewhere. Admittedly, it’s enough to make the ending more ambiguous — it’s just slightly demented enough to leave some room for doubt as to whether the presented ending really happened.
But for the most part, what we get are Linda and Brandon playing head games with each other. In particular, Brandon descends into a paranoid wreck as his ego refuses to accept a place of lesser power to Linda. He remains pathologically convinced that Linda will try and betray him at some point, and what’s really fucked up is that he might not be wrong. Raimi uses all manner of misdirects and selective editing, all leading to some big reveal that both characters knew more and did more than we had been led to believe until that point.
With Simon of Iron Lung, pretty much the one constant we’ve got to hold onto is that he wants to live. He doesn’t care about secrets or corporate profits, he just wants to work off his sentence and go home. But even that starts to change as the plot unfolds. Over time, Simon starts to ask questions about whether he has anything to live for or go back to in a post-apocalyptic world. Whether there’s any hope that he could change or that anyone else will give him another chance.
Perhaps most importantly, Simon is faced with the distinct possibility that — however unfair it is, despite all other promises made to him — he might have to die so humanity can live. It’s a neat question as to how or whether he would make that sacrifice, after an entire movie of insisting that all he wants is to live. And of course, it’s an open question as to whether the corporate overlords are sincerely willing or able to make such a sacrifice worth it.
Then again, it’s after the apocalypse and humanity is near extinction. So it’s not like this particular corporation can afford to make a habit of sacrificing people.
The interplay in Send Help is significantly more complex, in large part because we’ve got two characters running around. A recurring problem with Iron Lung is that our protagonist is literally trapped in a tin can, incapable of doing much of anything without the bosses up top. And yes, that futility is a crucial thematic point. But in Send Help, the corporate exec and the laborer both interact with each other directly, both capable of helping or harming each other, and the corporate executive is directly dependent on the laborer who actually knows what she’s doing. Thus we get an interplay that hammers home the anti-corporate themes while delivering far more engaging conflict.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that there was never anything wrong with Linda, except that she was stuck working in a cubicle where she couldn’t really thrive. In the island, it’s the opposite: Brandon is stuck outside of his comfort zone while Linda has found hers. Thus Brandon slowly devolves into a monster while Linda blossoms into… well, into Rachel McAdams.
But even then, there’s a steady corruption seeping into Linda’s character as well. It’s an open question as to what it would take for Linda to go back to civilization, after she’s found a way to thrive so heartily on this island. More importantly, what would she do to stop any effort at rescue?
I can respect Iron Lung for its impressive atmosphere and effects. In all his various roles on all sides of the camera, Markiplier turns in an ambitious and admirable debut. I totally believe that he did a fine job taking the experience of playing the game and adapting it into a movie.
That said, there’s no doubt that Send Help works better as a movie and as a story. I know a lot of Iron Lung‘s secrecy is by design, but it’s pretty damning when the details that matter to the protagonist are so terribly jumbled. So much of the movie is taken up by exposition dumps about the world outside the sub and Simon’s life before the plot, and none of it works. By comparison, Send Help is a meaner film that makes more effective use of its spartan setting, bloody action, and suspenseful misdirects.
Ultimately, I can give Iron Lung a pass. As a glorified commercial for the game, the film works perfectly well. And considering that it’s a two-hour movie made by a debut filmmaker on a miniscule budget and scale, the film works more than well enough by those standards. Send Help, on the other hand, is the work of a master who’s spent a lifetime honing this particular craft.
Iron Lung has more potential to change things, if Markiplier goes on to make more and better movies, and if other game-to-film producers take notice. But Send Help is unquestionably the better film here and now.
