Susan Granger’s review of “Last Breath” (Focus Features)
If you enjoy sitting on the edge of your seat, heart-racing, biting your nails with anxiety about what will happen next, “Last Breath” is for you.
Based on a true story, it’s about a diver performing routine pipeline repair work 300 feet below the surface of the North Sea when the cable attached to his diving bell snapped, leaving him stranded in the dark with his oxygen running out
Living with his nervous fiancé Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) in a trailer on the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, young, curly-haired Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) is a saturation diver – which is described as “the most dangerous job on Earth.”
Saturation divers work at great depths for an extended period in a pressurized environment that prevents decompression sickness – a.k.a. ‘the bends.’ This ‘saturation’ technique allows them to perform complex underwater tasks – like maintenance and construction – without needing to decompress after each dive.
In September, 2012, Chris joined his teammates – veteran Duncan Allock (Woody Harrelson) and brusque Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) – on a vessel assigned to oil pipeline repair work deep underwater in the treacherous North Sea.
A crisis occurred when the ship’s dynamic computerized positioning system failed during an intense storm while Chris and Dave were diving. Then – suddenly – Chris became untethered, drifting away with only ten minutes of oxygen left in his suit.
What happens next can only be described as gripping, high-tension logistics, as his shipmates – including Cliff Curtis, Mark Bonnar, Myanna Buring – devise various schemes to find and rescue now-unconscious Chris, eventually using an underwater mechanical retriever that resembles the kind of claw that kids use to grab a toy from an arcade vending device,
Scripted by Mitchell LaFortune, David Brooks and director Alex Parkinson, it’s an authentically claustrophobic adventure that manages to be visually compelling even in the murky darkness – thanks to cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews.
If this sounds familiar, Alex Parkinson made it into a 2019 British documentary which he’s expanded significantly,
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Last Breath” is an intense, suspenseful 6, streaming on Prime Video, Peacock and Apple TV.
