I Think We're Alone Now

A slow cinema horror home run by a gaming YouTuber is 2026's unlikeliest film

Have you ever thought about just how hard it is to make a screen adaptation of a video game?

We tend to think of adaptations in a one-size-fits-all way: A straightforward retelling of a narrative and depiction of a cast of characters. It’s not that simple, of course. A film adaptation can be entirely faithful to its source, but it can also disregard all of those details and take a more creative, interpretive tack. Consider the difference between Paul Thomas Anderson’s two Thomas Pynchon adaptations. Inherent Vice is taken more or less verbatim from the novel of the same name, and more than that it beautifully evokes the feeling of reading it, of losing yourself in amongst its oddball personalities and endless looping digressions. One Battle After Another uses only the vaguest impressions of Vineland’s plot and characters to tell an entirely new story, capturing some essential qualities of Pynchon’s novel and using it as mortar for a largely original construction.

But it’s easy to think of book-to-screen adaptations in this way because the characteristics of a novel are easy to translate to a film. You can reproduce a book’s story—even its prose—in a screenplay, and cinema is well-suited to recapturing the feeling of reading a book and imagining its action. By contrast, the essential characteristics of a video game, the things that make it special, are nearly impossible to directly translate to another medium. The process is closer to adapting a sculpture than to adapting a novel.

When people talk about good video game adaptations, they tend to mean one of three things. The first emerged only recently in the form of prestige cable and streaming shows that take seriously the tone and setting of a game yet miss something fundamental about the experience of playing them. The Last of Us and Fallout are good examples here, particularly the former. Watching HBO’s version of The Last of Us, you might never know that the real pleasure of those games comes from their beautifully designed stealth sandbox sequences, because it’s not an experience that really translates.

The second and much more common kind of game adaptation is the cheery fanservice delivery mechanism concerned mostly with regurgitating iconography. The Super Mario Bros. Movie or the recent Sonic the Hedgehog films adapt games that by and large don’t have cinematic stories to begin with, so fans don’t expect much beyond seeing their favorite characters and locations rendered expensively on a big screen. These too are only adaptations in the strictest sense; nothing about the feeling of platforming in a Mario or Sonic game can truly be reproduced on screen.

The third kind of video game screen adaptations is the wild card, the films that barely even try to represent what their source material was about. These used to be much more common, as there was a chauvinistic attitude toward games in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that led filmmakers to disregard their details entirely in the translation process. Sometimes this led to junk, though it often led to gems: Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films and his take on Monster Hunter are intriguing, entertaining postmodern collages of iconography and action, and Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill makes excellent use of the game’s major visual motifs to tell an original story (Gans’ recent sequel Return to Silent Hill is an odd yet artistically productive blend of all three approaches).

These are the kinds of films we have been led to expect, even in a moment where a consensus grows that video game adaptations have finally “made it” in a concrete way. A sense gradually builds that this might be as good as it gets, that the gap between interactivity and perspective means that the two mediums are incompatible in some fundamental way, and that any meeting between the two must necessarily involve compromise.

But improbable things can happen in this world. Markiplier, the YouTuber who rose to popularity on a wave of creators whose gimmick was “comically screaming at horror video games,” did one such thing. His feature debut Iron Lung, based on the video game of the same name, released in a ludicrous number of theaters last week. It’s an excellent film, and it may be the first ever truly successful translation of a video game to the big screen.

I understand how tempting it is to make Mr. Plier (real name Mark Fishbach, credited mononymously by his YouTube name on screen) himself the focus of the story—to center discussion on the economics of the production, the self-funding, the many hats he wore on set, the way he mobilized his fanbase to theaters, most of all the novelty of “YouTuber cinema” as a category. I’m indulging in it a little myself. Watching Iron Lung, one can’t help but compare it favorably to other recent films by YouTube personalities: The endlessly tedious influence-checking of Shelby Oaks, the sweaty maximalist approach to scares of the Rackaracka boys with Bring Her Back, the humiliating and instantly dated meta-sentimentality of Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. But Iron Lung deserves better than to be in conversation with these films, and it deserves better than to only be discussed in terms of the unlikeliness of its production.

What’s most impressive about what Markiplier does with Iron Lung the film is the fact that Iron Lung the game is an especially improbable candidate for screen adaptation. The game, which takes only 45 minutes to play from beginning to end, is beyond minimalist in its narrative. Some opening text explains that every star and planet has vanished from the sky, leaving the remnants of human civilization who lived on space stations to explore the few remaining celestial bodies for something that can help them survive. One alien moon is covered entirely in oceans of blood, and a submarine with a crew of one is sent into the depths to see what, if anything, it can find. The submarine has no windows on it, so the only way to navigate is by matching the coordinates on the sub’s console to a simple map, and the only way to see what’s immediately outside the sub is by taking pictures with a camera.

The game is slow, repetitive, and process-focused by design. Maneuvering the sub requires accelerating in short bursts, frequently stopping to check the coordinates on the map before returning to adjust your trajectory. While the game does technically take place in a fully rendered 3D space, you’re only ever able to see it in restrictive single frames from your camera, and the photos it takes are fuzzy and indistinct. The game is all about the physical experience of the sub’s small interior, the creaking of its metal joints, the imprecision of the analog instruments, the plodding process of taking photos. This is hardly high-octane action-packed gaming.

For its first 20 minutes, the film follows through on this structure, with some slight additions and concessions. For one, the game is played in first-person, with little information on the character you’re controlling, while the film stars Markiplier himself as a convict who has been promised clemency if he completes an undersea tour in the blood ocean. There’s dialogue between him and a commanding officer on the ship’s radio that wasn’t in the game and that feels a bit unnecessary, but otherwise it’s more or less a depiction of that same dry process. Markiplier inputs vectors, punches the thrust, and snaps some hazy photos.

I went into Iron Lung with the lowest possible expectations. Some readers may know that I co-host a podcast called Get Cynical, and we did a season a few years ago on feature films made by YouTubers: every single one of them, unsurprisingly, was barrel-bottom terrible. None of the skills required to make viral video content carry over to the art of filmmaking. That Markiplier was a gaming YouTuber specifically was a greater blow; almost all he’s ever had to do is point the camera at himself and start recording. His playthrough of Iron Lung the game isn’t even edited. Nothing about this man’s work or the milieu in which he operated could have indicated to a rational thinking person that he had any talent as a filmmaker. I expected to spend the film’s runtime reminded of dreck like the Paul brothers’ Airplane Mode or Shane Dawson’s Not Cool, quarter-assed slapdash ego trips for men entirely too convinced of their artistic worth.

Yet I found myself instantly hooked by the opening passages of Iron Lung, and the films I was thinking of were 2000s horror indies like Session 9 or In the Dark, films whose small budgets created productive restrictions and compelling textures. There is nothing slapdash about Iron Lung, nothing lazy or easy. The single set is remarkably convincing, and Markiplier finds a shocking variety of ways to shoot inside it. It feels as though he gets through all two-plus-hours without ever repeating a camera setup. The foundation of the film isn’t a narcissistic desire to parlay internet fame into the “big leagues,” it’s genuine creativity and inventiveness and, above all, reverence for the source material.

I would never have imagined an adaptation of this game that would be truly representative of the experience of playing it. It is surely too slow, too slight to make it to screens without some Hollywood beefing-up. Indeed, I thought that’s what had happened when Markiplier’s character (given the name Simon for the film) finds an alien skeleton resting on the sea bed and is pulled back to the surface by his excited, anxious superiors. It seems as though the film is going to open up in a destructive way, stomping on its own deliciously thick atmosphere for the sake of general palatability. Yet Markiplier stays admirably committed to the bit. The camera never leaves the sub, and we only ever see these other characters through a tiny porthole. Blood keeps flowing over it and obscuring Simon’s view, but he can’t wipe it away. Markiplier seems to understand that one of the core appeals of the game is the inability to see clearly, the unnerving struggle to comprehend what’s right in front of you.

After that brief scene, Simon is dropped right back into the blood ocean, and we spend a further 30 minutes with him slowly piloting the ship, remarking on coordinates, drawing maps, taking blurry photos of the strange objects on the ocean floor. This is where we spend the rest of the movie. There is a plot, such as it is, with some expansions of our understanding of the world only hinted at by the game. But even these expansions are delightfully vague, inexplicable suggestions of a story which serve to confuse more than clarify. There are a few big setpiece moments (a tense sequence in a crawlspace below-deck is impressively well-staged) and a few beats one could technically describe as “reveals,” but the vast majority of this movie unfolds in a mode of slow, stressful, unpleasant and textured process, growing progressively abstract and incomprehensible as it goes.

By contrast, a couple years ago, a film called In A Violent Nature promoted itself as a kind of “slow cinema horror” movie. Its gimmick was to make a slasher movie that exclusively follows the killer, with the traditional story involving a cast of sexy young victims unfolding at the margins and most of the runtime taken up by watching the murderer wordlessly stalk from death to death. I found it an outrageous disappointment; far from the slow cinema promise, it relentlessly cuts corners and speeds things along, chopping what could have been hypnotic sequences following the killer walking through forests in unbroken takes into dull, featureless montages. Walking out of the theater, I thought about how much better it would have been if it was actually committed to taking its time, yet the horror-head audience members around me were all complaining that it was too slow! This is not a subset of the general audience who are primed to accept a deliberately unhurried film. And you know who else that applies to? Young adult viewers of video game YouTubers.

With that in mind, consider the degree of confidence it takes for Markiplier to make an actual slow cinema horror film, one that cuts no corners and makes no compromises. There are long stretches of Iron Lung where the only thing happening on screen is Simon walking back and forth in the sub, making marks on a map, taking pictures and occasionally grunting. This repetition achieves a similarly mesmerizing effect to films like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century or Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, however absurd it feels to put these filmmakers’ names in the same sentence as the man whose exaggerated shrieks launched Five Nights at Freddy’s into the mainstream.

His filmmaking only gets more assured as it goes on, his rhythmic check-ins with the physicality of the space more arresting. I think he is a genuine directorial savant, someone who intuitively understands the power of withholding visual stimulus, of deliberately-paced revelation, of how to establish the geometry and continuity of a space and then rupture our understanding of it with the intrusion of totally unfathomable images. A video gaming YouTuber has made a work that demands the viewer’s visual attention more than almost anything else currently in theaters, and he chose to reward that attention with images abstract to the point of total illegibility. Oh, and he’s also a pretty good actor.

There has already been plenty of discussion about the larger implications of this movie. It’s a triumphant success for independent filmmaking outside both the traditional studio system and the ecosystem of “mega-indies” like A24 or Neon. It’s worth taking a step back from any proclamations regarding what it means for the future of the art form, though. Outsiders attempting to replicate the success of Iron Lung likely won’t have $3 million to spend on it, or a legion of millions of pre-existing fans to pack theaters, and that’s before we even think about whether or not they’ll have any talent. The prospect of a trend is there, but we cannot yet make any promises.

In my wildest dreams for the future of cinema, though? This is what the kids are watching. They’re rejecting second-screen slop, rejecting flat weightless Volume compositions and endless vocal reminders of what the characters are doing. They’re paying rapt attention to challenging, conceptual stories. They’re seeking out the texture that large-scale streaming options so consistently deny them. They’re discovering slow cinema and calling it “vibes movies.”

That’s also very optimistic, I know, but I can indulge in that unlikely possibility a little. After all, I’ve just seen the most unlikely movie of 2026.