Last Breath Review: A Deep-Sea Disaster Movie That Won't Leave You Breathless

How do you make a satisfying disaster movie out of an experience that was resolved in just over half an hour? Adapting his own hit Netflix documentary of the same name from 2019, director Alex Parkinson offers some fittingly intense genre thrills without ever fully justifying why he needed to return to this deep-sea nightmare in a conventional big-screen narrative.

Often caught between faux-documentary realism, mimicking — or even directly lifting — footage from the divers' body cameras seen in that earlier work with grander staged spectacle, "Last Breath" is frequently frustrating due to this uneven positioning. The co-writer-slash-director's proximity to its real-life subjects means he can't put too much of an over-the-top Hollywood twist on the tale, but any intent to do justice to the reality of the story just left me wondering why he would want to tell it again if he weren't going to lean into the gloriously preposterous traits one would expect from the classic disaster movie.

"Peaky Blinders" alum Finn Cole plays Chris Lemons, who in 2012, returned to the North Sea for another shift doing what the opening crawl informs us is one of — if not the most — dangerous jobs known to man: engineering work at the bottom of the North Sea, approximately 100 meters below the surface. Urgently called in to fix an energy pipeline ahead of a particularly cold spot in the winter period, Chris embarks on the mission with his jovial, almost at retirement co-worker Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), and the stoic David Yuasa (Simu Liu), who would rather be spending every second in their shared vessel working out over bonding with his colleagues. Disaster strikes when Chris and David head out to begin their repair work as a storm rages on the surface, which pulls their vessel out of place, their umbilical tethers yanking them away from where they were working. Chris's tether gets caught and is about to snap, with David needing to return to Duncan before they can mount a rescue mission — although, with only five minutes of oxygen left in his suit, the assumption is that Chris has been left to die, despite his colleague's best survival advice.

The brief five-minute window following this, which plays out in almost real time, delivers on the stressful, intense thrills its conceit promises. It's no surprise that this is also the window where Alex Parkinson strays furthest from his documentary, dramatizing events that weren't previously captured on a bodycam — or at least, weren't recoverable from one — against the most fatal ticking clock imaginable. Like the best survival thrillers, we have a protagonist who refuses to accept the death warrant that circumstances have all but signed for him, and who has one clear, simple objective; to pull himself up to the top of a structure that will allow him to be easily rescued. Doing this against the elements at the bottom of the ocean is a herculean task, which the film stresses without the need for additional action movie obstacles — the currents he's swimming against are powerful enough to make any additional deep-sea antagonist unnecessary.

It doesn't betray its realist aspirations, but does make the against-the-odds battle feel properly cinematic in a way the documentary-adjacent aesthetics don't allow it elsewhere. This is likely thanks to cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews also serving as the second unit director, with this centerpiece action sequence having a clearly defined visual flourish — the dark red hues of a flare amidst the jet-black abyss of the surrounding ocean — that distinguishes it from the rest of the movie. The underwater sequences will unsettle any viewer with a nervous disposition, but this race against the clock is the sole moment with an additional edge. It feels like it was designed for the big screen, where the rest of the movie is largely interchangeable with the streaming documentary — even the presence of A-list actors can't hide just how flat and unremarkable the cinematography is when back on the vessel and up at the surface. It might be by design, trying to mimic the dull, administrative feel of the on-board CCTV cameras, but when this story has already been told faithfully using that equipment, the director had a license to make bolder, more distinct visual choices.

In this regard, "Last Breath" unfortunately pales in comparison to two other recent aquatic disaster movies based on fortuitous real-life events: director Peter Berg's BP oil spill epic "Deepwater Horizon," and Ron Howard's "Thirteen Lives," about the attempt to rescue the junior Thai soccer team from a collapsed cave. Both prove more adept at balancing the sobering facts of their respective incidents with the scale and sustained tension audiences desire from this genre, but it's Howard's 2022 film — unfairly dumped straight on Amazon Prime Video, despite rumors it received MGM's highest test screening scores in history — that more effectively sets the template Alex Parkinson should have aspired toward. 

That movie also feature unglamorous, vérité-style documentary camerawork when its A-list cast navigates the drama from the comfort of their office, but when underground, appropriately dials up the claustrophobia to levels that would have had audiences hyperventilating had it been allowed to be seen on the big screen. Admittedly, Howard had one of the best, most unheralded cinematographers working today (frequent Luca Guadagnino collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) by his side to vividly dramatize those harrowing true events, but there was nothing about their approach that couldn't have been scaled down to size here without losing anything in translation.

At only 94 minutes, "Last Breath" makes for one of the shortest disaster movies I can recall, and that might be another sign that there wasn't enough within Chris Lemmons' remarkable story to sustain a narrative in this genre territory. There are spectacularly tense sequences, but due to how fast the story was resolved in real life, it can't maintain that level of intensity for too long before the life-saving mission is carried out and resolved. The director's accompanying documentary is the most effective way of conveying the inherent horror of this story, and how its subject overcame unthinkable odds to survive in ways that left scientists baffled — as a drama, you'll find yourself exhaling too soon after the impossible stakes have been set.

"Last Breath" premieres in theaters on February 28.