LAST BREATH (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Last Breath, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2025

Even without seeing co-writer/director Alex Parkinson's previous documentary on the same subject (which apparently wasn't released theatrically in the United States), the conclusion of Last Breath is a given. People generally don't make movies about senseless tragedies. They do, however, love to make ones about such tragedies narrowly and almost miraculously avoided.

That's not the issue with Parkinson's movie. It does a competent and, at times, harrowing job of dramatizing how a saturation diver working on deep-sea pipeline became stranded, how an entire team of sailors and technicians and fellow divers mounted a rescue mission, and how every step of those efforts was fraught with risk and looked pretty hopeless. The movie understands and communicates the hows of this scenario quite well. It simply comes up short on the whys and what any of this story means beyond depicting its assorted procedures with clarity.

On the other hand, the fact that Parkinson, along with fellow screenwriters Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks, does offer a clear sense of this kind of diving in practice, the chain reaction of events that lead to the central conflict, and the many challenges faced by several people in the effort to save one man is an accomplishment. It's quite the dramatization of a real event, but it's missing some decided human or thematic element to push the material beyond that.

The man at the center of the tale is Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a professional diver living a rustic and pleasant life with his fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), who mainly has the thankless role of worrying about her man by way of some video messages and shots of her sitting alone at home. She, like everyone and everything beyond the job, is irrelevant here, and until the story tries and struggles to find some deeper meaning to everything we've witnessed, that's fine.

Indeed, that philosophy is how Chris' fellow diver Dave Yasa (Simu Liu) gets through these long expeditions, in which weeks are spent in a metallic chamber, where divers become acclimated to the severe pressure shifts, and underwater. Dave is a professional through and through, who lightly chides Chris for taping a photo of Morag next to his bunk.

Once the work begins, everything outside the hatch, in Dave's mind, is only a distraction for the dangerous job ahead for these divers. A single, late moment of Dave revealing he has a photograph of his own doesn't exactly cut through how the character here exists as just another cog in the intricate gears of this story.

The team's third diver is Duncan Allock (Woody Harrelson), a long-time diver who tells Chris that this dive will be his last. The company has determined he has aged out of the job, and he's too in love with it to even consider doing anything else, even supervising dives as Craig (Mark Bonnar), sitting on the bridge of the ship transporting the divers and their metal containers to the North Sea, is on this job. Duncan and Chris have known each other over the course of several dives, but this is the first time the young man will be doing this specific work.

With all of that basic characterization in place, the screenplay proceeds to drop most of it, ignore any additional details or examine any obvious potential changes to these men, and get right to the task at hand. From here on out, the story becomes about diving bells large enough to hold three men and all their diving equipment, umbilical cords that provide air from the bell to the divers' suits, and the ship and its crew, led by Captain Jenson (Cliff Curtis), on water's surface trying to keep the bell hovering over a pipe manifold on the seabed.

It's actually, of course, about how every established detail can, will, and does go wrong. A storm begins rocking the ship, leading to a failure of the vessel's engines. There are scenes of genuine terror here, as the out-of-control ship pulls on the bell, which begins yanking on the divers connected to it. One grueling moment has Chris tangled within the rigging of the manifold, leading the ship's crew to realize they've stopped—because the diver is acting as an anchor. Something is going to give, and it's either going to be the umbilical or the diver's body.

Somehow, things become even worse than that. While the specifics won't be detailed because the story really does hinge on experiencing how each bit of safety equipment and protocol collapses, the plot consists of watching people who know their jobs do them well, figure out novel ways to do things or use equipment differently, or stand by hopelessly as the mission to find Chris hovers between a rescue effort and a recovery one. Using practical effects and underwater settings, Parkinson uses the claustrophobia of creeping darkness to notable effect.

Last Breath is effective, to be sure, until its resolution and epilogue, when it becomes clear that the filmmakers have no idea how to handle the questions of mortality and the rationale for doing this job that this story raises. After all, the characters here really do only exist for the work and, more to the point of the movie, the story at hand, and with all of that resolved, the whole exercise reveals itself to be one of hollow dramatic re-creation.

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