Last Breath Is, Well, Breathtaking

The great thrillers don’t just carry us along, they pull us in. As soon as director Alex Parkinson starts walking us through the inner workings of the ship and the pressurization tools used by the deep-sea saturation divers in the new underwater-survival drama Last Breath, we know we’re in sure hands. The camera lingers over the tanks, the pipes, the gauges, the churning machines; we may not know what each contraption specifically does, but the director immediately places us in a tangible, tactile world. This is key to building any kind of suspense, but it becomes especially crucial in a film that is all about process and technology — and how those things can go tragically, catastrophically wrong.

Parkinson, a longtime nonfiction filmmaker, based Last Breath on his 2018 documentary (also called Last Breath, co-directed with Richard da Costa) about the same terrifying 2012 incident, in which a deep-sea diver was stranded on the sea floor without oxygen during an attempt to fix a North Sea gas pipeline. The new film is only 91 minutes, but within its slender running time, Parkinson & Co. bring these people and their predicament to life.

These are broad-strokes characters, but the sincerity with which they’re handled ensures that they feel more like compelling archetypes than tiresome clichés: Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) is a young diver planning a new life with his fiancée, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury); Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) is the grizzled, jokey veteran who knows he’ll be let go after this one last dive; and Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) is the stoic, all-business tough guy nicknamed “the Vulcan.” These men are one of several teams sent to repair a damaged pipeline in the freezing, turbulent seas off Aberdeen, Scotland.

It’s a grueling process: Before they dive, they have to spend 28 days inside a pressurization chamber that will acclimate their bodies to working at great depths and breathing in a gas mixture of helium and oxygen. Once they dive, they’re surrounded by a vast technological apparatus providing them with power, oxygen, heat, communication, and direction through thick umbilical cables, as well as a ship held in place on the high seas by a complex automated dynamic-positioning system.

And then, it all goes kaput. Thanks to Parkinson’s showing us all these systems beforehand, once things start to break down (and they break down quite quickly), we immediately grasp the gravity of the situation. After that, it’s heart-attack city as we watch the men underwater (and those on the surface) do all they can to save their downed comrade. Parkinson helpfully (dare I say, almost sadistically) includes an occasional countdown telling us how much oxygen remains in the stranded diver’s tank. He keeps the onscreen clock ticking after the oxygen runs out, too. I’m being purposely vague about what happens and to whom, though those who’ve seen the earlier documentary or are otherwise familiar with the 2012 North Sea incident will know this — not to mention how it all turned out.

There’s an artful elegance to this film’s suspense as well. Parkinson frames his shots so that they’re both beautiful and stomach gnawing — from the sickly green hue of the small pools of light surrounding the divers doing deep-sea work, to the terrifying image of a stranded man holding up a red flare amid the hellish blackness of the sea floor, to the image of the massive boat being rocked back and forth by fearsome waves.

As far as I can tell, this is the director’s first fully narrative effort, but he has clearly used his familiarity with the original events, as well as perhaps a professional dedication to capturing reality, to his advantage; there’s a documentary-like clarity to every scene. Parkinson also follows in the footsteps of artists who understand the value of showing us how things work as a way of establishing suspense. (Think of James Cameron, whose patience in showing us the inner workings of the ship in Titanic — the men working in its bowels, all those pounding pistons and burning furnaces — fills us with awe when things are going smoothly and with terror when they’re not.) Last Breath is a studio release in late February, not exactly the kind of wide distribution that sets the box office on fire. But it feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.