Last Breath Review

Deep beneath the ocean’s surface lies over 2000 miles of industrial pipeline. Naturally, given that the watery environment is in a perpetual state of flux, these systems of undersea gas lines require constant upkeep. Those tasked with this maintenance are known as “saturation divers”. They are specialists who travel to the ocean’s floor and work in depths of up to 1000 feet in freezing temperatures and are surrounded by a pitch-black abyss. Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath tells the real-life story of one of those divers, Chris Lemons (Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole), who was left stranded at the bottom of the North Sea after an accident.

That first paragraph sounds like a perfect elevator pitch for a horror film; a lone diver trapped underwater in total darkness with a finite amount of oxygen. Throw in some bloodthirsty sharks and you’ve got yourself 47 Meters Down. But while the premise does ring true to a horror film, Last Breath is an impressive mix of disaster, survival, thriller, biopic, and drama movie – all rolled into one.

This isn’t the first time Parkinson has told this story. In 2019 he and co-director Richard da Costa released a documentary of the same name to positive reception. Now six years later, he’s giving this true man-against-the-elements tale the Hollywood treatment and he’s brought along some star-power to help him, including Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu. What’s amusing is even though they are portraying real-life people, their characters seemingly fit the go-to archetypes you would associate with a fictitious disaster movie.

Harrelson plays the seasoned wisecracking Duncan. A self-proclaimed “relic” who has been at the job for twenty years and is one mission away from retirement. There’s another genre in the mix; the buddy cop movie because Duncan and Chris’s dynamic is very much the old-pro and the rookie. Simu Liu rounds out the trio with the all-business Dave. He’s the strong, stoic type who recognises the dangers of the job and even though he has to share a confined space with his colleagues for 28 days, he doesn’t have much time for male bonding or Duncan’s silly jokes. Together they make a likeable triptych that descends below the ship in weighted dive suits and is tethered by a series of tubes, which are essentially an umbilical cord between them and the crew above, providing them with oxygen and communication.

SUPPORT US! WE ARE A SMALL, INDEPENDENT FILM WEBSITE WITH NO BIG BACKERS SO IF YOU LOVE OUR SITE AND OUR WRITERS, PLEASE CONSIDER HELPING US TO KEEP FILM JOURNALISM ALIVE.

However, what starts as a routine job becomes a race-against-the-clock rescue mission. As Chris and Dave are mid-dive, the ship’s Dynamic Position System fails during a storm, and the ship begins to drift off course. As they scramble to get back onboard the ship, Chris’s umbilical cable gets snagged and snaps off. Leaving him isolated 300ft beneath the surface and with about 10 minutes of backup oxygen before he runs out. To go into detail about the duration of how long Chris was left stranded underwater would spoil the effect of the movie. But those who do not know the outcome before going in are left to wonder: is this a survival story or a body-retrieval story? Parkinson does a fantastic job of leaving both Chris and the informed audience members in the dark.

In a story like this, time is of the essence and Last Breath is a suspenseful, nail-biting thriller that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Like the divers, Parkinson gets in, gets the job done, and gets out. Whilst there isn’t much fat in the film’s 93-minute runtime, it’s likely some creative liberties were taken to pad out the runtime to a feature-length. A sequence involving a crew member rewiring and rebooting the GPS feels straight out of Hollywood.

But despite that, Last Breath has got everything you could want from a big screen movie; a sturdy ensemble all delivering excellent performances, high stakes tension, haunting visual,s and top-notch sound design and visual effects. It doesn’t have the flair or immersion factor of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity but it is a gripping against-the-odds thriller that will have you waiting to exhale.