To paraphrase and/or completely misquote Karl Marx: History repeats itself first as documentary, then as a mid-budget survival thriller. “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” was adapted into “Rescue Dawn.” “The Rescue” was adapted into “Thirteen Lives.” And now, in that strange tradition, an incident that was first expressed through interview testimony and harrowing surveillance footage has been smoothed into a simple but suspenseful genre exercise, as Alex Parkinson adapts his 2019 documentary “Last Breath” into a mid-budget survival thriller of the same name.
Creatively redundant? Perhaps. But some things are so unbelievable that they only seem to make sense as a Hollywood (or Hollywood-adjacent) movie, and the gap between fact and fiction can occasionally be too wide to cross without a middle-man to help launder the truth. The story of saturation diver Chris Lemons is definitely one of them.
In September 2012, the young Mr. Lemons was trying to repair some pipeline along the floor of the North Sea when disaster struck on the surface 300 feet above, ultimately severing the “umbilical cord” that connected the diver to his ship and stranded him in the pitch-black deep with only seven minutes’ worth of oxygen in his reserve tank. A worst-case scenario in a job that already seems too frightening to fathom, Lemons’ situation was like a nightmare having a nightmare of its own. Of course, that didn’t stop the rest of his team from risking their own necks in an attempt to rescue him, as it stands to reason that anyone crazy enough to work as a sat diver for a living — industrial scuba types who prepare for each job in a pressurized chamber that allows them to perform multiple shifts without having to decompress — is also crazy enough to search the ocean floor for a colleague who’s all but guaranteed to be dead already.
All but! It’s unlikely that Parkinson would have made a documentary about this disaster if Lemons had died; it’s unthinkable he would have adapted that documentary into a scripted feature unless the story built to some kind of miracle. Of course it does. And yet, predictable as it might be in the abstract, “Last Breath” is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions.
That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed. Co-written with David Brooks and Mitchell LaFortune, Parkinson’s ultra-functional script feasts on the fact that Chris Lemons — a baby-faced young diver with a worried fiancée waiting for him back home — was something of a disaster film cliche at the time of his fateful plunge. He’s played here by a cherubic and positively buoyant Finn Cole, and the emotional stakes of this story rest on the shoulders of an opening scene in which he and his beloved Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) sit in their trailer on the windswept Scottish coastline and talk about his job as if for the very first time. “It’s like going into space, but underwater,” he reassures her. Morag is not reassured. The look in her eyes is confirmation enough that Chris will be at the heart of the crisis that’s about to unfold.
This 93-minute gasp of a movie doesn’t exactly have a ton of slack, but it benefits a great deal from our general unfamiliarity with sat diving, and Parkinson delights in all of the strange little details that factor into the job. The massive helmets, which are significantly larger than the copper domes associated with classic aquanauts. The colorful braided wires that connect the divers to their diving bell like an exposed LAN cord. The cube-shaped power structures that sat divers have to wriggle their way through in order to fix a busted valve or whatnot.
To a much lesser extent, we learn about the personality types who might be compelled to do it. Specifics are few and far between when it comes to self-proclaimed “sat daddy” Duncan Allcock, but the fact that he’s played by a chortling Woody Harrelson tells us everything we need to know. It wasn’t Duncan’s idea to retire at the end of this rotation, but it was his idea to hire Chris for his last swim; he’s worked with the kid before, and feels confident in his ability to get things done without dying.
Perhaps just as importantly, Duncan is confident that he can spend four straight days with Chris in a small metal tube without wanting to kill himself as their bodies are gradually saturated with inert gas. How either of those men will survive their stone-faced third wheel is a different story altogether, as the first thing David Yuasa (Simu Liu) tells his co-workers is that he doesn’t want to hear any sentimental chit-chat about their lives back on land; he’s got two daughters back at home, and he’s convinced that he’ll only get to see them again if his colleagues remain laser-focused at all times. “Jaws” this is not, but Harrelson is affable enough to keep David from sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and it isn’t long before the logistics of the dive itself begin to drive the conversation.
Duncan stays in the diving bell while Chris and David plunge into the darkness below, and while there isn’t exactly a whole lot to see down there, “Last Breath” credibly sells the illusion of watching Shang-Chi and one of the Peaky Blinders skulk around the bottom of the North Sea. There’s a workman-like rigor to the brief scenes of the sat divers spelunking through all of that watery nothing, and Parkinson makes sure that we have a clear sense of the geography even when there’s nothing to look at besides how little there is to look at. But we don’t have to look at nothing for long, as a software malfunction up on the surface causes the crew’s ship to drift just enough for Chris’ line to get snagged on a structure — and then sever.
From there, the rest of “Last Breath” unfolds more or less in real-time, as David races back to the diving bell while the people aboard the main vessel above — led by a stoic but criminally underused Cliff Curtis — scramble to fix the problem. It’s a process that takes roughly 40 minutes from start to finish and involves minimal complications beyond the fact that Chris is lost in the void without a single molecule of oxygen left in his task, but Parkinson squeezes every second of the crisis for all that it’s worth, and the situation is always as clear as the water is murky.
The movie doesn’t have to hold us in its grip for a particularly long time so far as these things go, but every second is pulled tighter by the fact that Chris appears to be so far beyond saving; this is the rare survival thriller in which you can’t help but side with naysayers like David, who insist that all hope is lost even as they double down on their efforts to save the day. And the “fact” that the rescue mission seems futile makes it all the more heroic to watch Duncan and David risk their own lives just to retrieve Chris’ body from a watery grave where no one else would ever find him. There may not be a lot going on under the surface, so to speak, but “Last Breath” — always effectively stressful when it needs to be — does a fine job of conveying just how miraculous it would be for anyone to survive this ordeal. It feels like the kind of thing that would only be possible in the movies, and the kind of thing you only believe could be possible because you’re watching one.
Grade: B-
Focus Features will release “Last Breath” in theaters on Friday, February 28.
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