There’s a certain kind of true-life logistical rescue drama — Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” is the granddaddy of them — that makes you realize how larded with theatrical devices most movies really are. “Last Breath” is an undersea suspense thriller based on a saturation-diving accident that took place off the coast of Scotland in 2012. It’s a movie about life-and-death predicaments, heroic actions, and the terror of being trapped in the icy black water 300 feet below the surface of the ocean.
Yet as I watched it, I kept thinking that if it were a made-up piece of Hollywood product, it would need a villain — a saboteur, perhaps, or maybe a ship’s captain who valued corporate profits over human life. “Last Breath” has none of that. The film is only 93 minutes long, and it’s a compact tale that never strays from its central situation. That’s what’s effective about it (and also, in a way, a bit limited). The movie never hypes what it’s showing you, always sticking to the hair-trigger reality it’s about.
It’s based on a British documentary from 2019 — also called “Last Breath,” and co-directed by Alex Parkinson, a British nonfiction filmmaker who is making his big-screen dramatic directorial debut here. He does a solid job, letting you feel his documentary roots in a way that defines the film’s nuts-and-bolts, stick-to-the-facts tension. The early minutes immerse us in the robo-industrial details of what it is to be a professional saturation diver — which means that you’re diving for a long enough period that your body tissue is brought into equilibrium with the pressures of the breathing gas, a delicate symbiosis that requires a lengthy period of decompression (days or even weeks). If that all sounds complicated (it is), you could put it like this, as the film does in an opening title: Saturation diving is one of the most dangerous professions on earth.
“Last Breath” centers on three divers who are part of a team that’s assigned to replace a section of pipeline that funnels gas along the bottom of the North Sea. The film’s sets don’t look like sets. We feel like we’re seeing real machinery, real wide-angle video monitors, and a real diving bell — the craft that will take them under, which resembles a bean-shaped submarine made of Jiffy Pop tinfoil. Inside, there are several compartments that house teams of divers.
In the film’s opening scene, we meet Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a curly-haired Scottish bloke, as he bids goodbye to Hanna (MyAnna Buring), his fiancée, who is clearly anxious about what Chris does for a living. (The film never suggests that there’s anything misplaced about that feeling.) Arriving at base camp, Chris reunites with Duncan Allcock, a veteran diver he has been on several missions with. The moment we see Woody Harrelson, with his wildcat grin and saintly irascibility, we sink into the feeling that this is, for all its verisimilitude, a lavish dramatic re-enactment. But the characterizations remain minimal, restricted to what we can see.
Duncan ribs himself as the old man of the group — but what he means is that he’s being put out to pasture by the company he works for. This, he reveals, will be his last dive. Chris is totally oriented toward Hanna back home, and that’s his defining trait. And then there’s David Yuasa, played by Simu Liu, star of the Marvel hit “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” He’s the man of few words, portrayed as off-puttingly brusque, except that Liu is so charismatic he shows us through his presence that David, who has two young daughters, isn’t a bad guy. He just doesn’t like to fuss around with cornball bro bonding.
As Duncan remains in the bell, Chris and David, in their scuba gear and spiked metal helmets, slip out the hole in the floor and down to the bottom of the sea, where there’s a boxy grate they can hold onto called the manifold. The task they’re doing is supposedly routine, but there’s one unusual element: Up top, the massive support ship the diving bell is tethered to is caught in a raging, wave-tossed sea storm. (Duncan is such a veteran he can tell how high the waves are just from observing the water in the bell pod.)
The divers get dragged away from the area where they were working, and Chris’s multi-colored “umbilical” rope snaps. That rope is truly a lifeline — it transmits the heliox that the divers are breathing. Chris has only 10 minutes of breathing gas stored in his backup canister, and that’s when he drifts into the watery darkness.
From that moment, the entire accident took 40 minutes, which plays out in real time. Chris makes it back to the manifold, but his gas has run out. He’s now lying there, in his helmet, with no oxygen. The film ticks off the time (five minutes with no oxygen; now 15 minutes…), as the action shifts to the scrambling above. To locate Chris, the mother ship’s whole damaged system needs to be shut down and rebooted (which an officer does in one of those suspense scenes with lots of wires). The captain (Cliff Curtis), at one point, must decide whether it’s worth risking an ecological disaster to use pincers to save one man (his answer: no).
I won’t reveal what happens, though it’s no spoiler to say that a story like this one doesn’t tend to get the big-screen treatment if it has a tragic ending. There’s a scene in which we’re quite fearful that things have not turned out well, and the moment that shifts that is so casually low-key it lifts the audience in a most unusual way. “Last Breath” delivers every incident with so much specificity that it’s like a cinematic piece of journalism. Yet it leaves you with a minor tingle of the uncanny.
