Even the most mundane moments are riveting in the new deep-sea drama film Last Breath.
The biggest compliment I can give Last Breath, a gripping, workmanlike new movie about an undersea rescue, is that I would happily watch a version of it where absolutely nothing goes wrong. The director Alex Parkinson’s debut dramatic film is based on his 2019 documentary of the same name; both recount an incident in the world of “saturation diving,” in which a technician was stranded 300 feet under the North Sea. It’s the kind of intense, rare, do-or-die emergency that’s worthy of a hefty Hollywood feature. But I was mesmerized enough just watching these people do their very odd, high-stakes job.
The heroes of both Parkinson’s original telling and the feature’s re-creation are Chris Lemons (played by Finn Cole), Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), and David Yuasa (Simu Liu): three deep-sea repairmen whose task is so unthinkably risky and weird, it’s hard to imagine humans actually being able to carry it out. And yet, Parkinson carefully takes viewers through the chipper aplomb with which these men approach their profession. We see them as they’re getting on a large boat in the North Sea, living in a pressurized habitat where they adjust to a helium-rich atmosphere, then hopping into a diving bell to go to the ocean floor and work on the pipes and systems lining it—these mysterious but vital structures that quietly underpin modern life.
The trio’s occupation feels akin to the experience of traveling to space. They isolate themselves from their families for months on end, relocating to the most hostile environments imaginable. I’ll admit that I’ve spent approximately zero minutes thinking about the giant gas lines and other such superstructures on the ocean floor until now, but once I understood what Last Breath was about, I was locked in. Parkinson’s background as a documentarian serves the movie well; he lays out every aspect of this strange operation for the audience without making his story feel like a Wikipedia entry.
Last Breath’s story unfurls in ways that go beyond the simply factual—in large part because of its charming cast. I’m not too familiar with Cole (who is best known for his work on the TV show Peaky Blinders), but he’s appropriately fresh-faced and lively as Lemons, the diving team’s newest member. He’s eager to learn the ropes from Harrelson’s grizzled vet, Allcock; the latter actor can play this kind of wisecracking mentor in his sleep, but he’s a reliably funny dispenser of exposition. As Yuasa, Liu also plays an archetype —the no-nonsense professional—but he keeps the character on the right side of curtness, underlining the extreme professionalism required in such a scary job.
I have no idea how Parkinson captured Last Breath’s underwater footage, which illustrates how dark, treacherous, and almost instantly frightening the deep sea is. This setting is not a place of wonder filled with peculiar flora and fauna, but a gaping, uninviting void. It’s so inhospitable that the presence of big pipes and industrial manifolds comes across as traces left behind by ancient aliens. When Lemons produced a wrench to start tightening some screws, I almost laughed: How could a pipe in such a surreal location be in need of such mundane maintenance?
Of course, things do go wrong, which viewers familiar with the true story know well. A computer error on the ship that the divers are tethered to causes it to drift off course. In the ensuing chaos, Lemons’s guideline (which gives him oxygen, power, and a chain to civilization) snaps, stranding him at the bottom of the ocean; he’s left with just a few minutes of life support. What happens next as his colleagues and other members of the crew try to save him is unimaginable and nerve-racking. But it’s also deeply, mesmerizingly process-oriented.
It would have been easy to inflate Last Breath’s action stakes to make them fun and absurd, but Parkinson’s nonfiction instincts as a filmmaker won’t really allow for that. I’m thankful for the meticulous realism that follows instead. Entire sequences are devoted to tasks as humdrum as rebooting a ship’s computer (which involves untangling a lot of wires) and shepherding a little robotic sub to try retrieving Lemons, which resembles a very tense version of a fairground claw game. Harrelson and Liu have plenty of movie-star appeal, but the director tends to keep them in stasis; they’re frequently parked in neutral as they figure out the best way back to their friend.
These scenes shouldn’t be so riveting, but they are—the film makes an effort to invest the audience in the story’s human concerns as much as in its more procedural elements. Last Breath is a midsize version of a large-scale thriller, one that isn’t afraid to seem boring, and I mean that as a major compliment.
