Last Breath review: incredible real story is a thrilling big-screen adventure

A true-story adventure to make you gasp, Last Breath recounts a tale of survival set in one of the most dangerous environments known to humankind, one that is every bit as inhospitable and perilous as those more obviously cinematic realms of outer space or the peaks of the Himalayas — 300 feet below the surface of the North Sea.

That's where deep-sea divers Chris Lemons, Duncan Allcock and Dave Yuasa ran into trouble in September 2012 while conducting what should have been a routine repair job on the sea bed off the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The ordeal that ensued has already been the subject of an acclaimed 2019 documentary (also titled Last Breath), co-directed by Richard da Costa and Alex Parkinson, and now Parkinson has turned the disaster into a gripping feature film starring Finn Cole, Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu.

The world the movie inhabits will be alien to most viewers, but Parkinson — who clearly knows the material inside out — sets forth its rules with speed and clarity. Lemons, Allcock and Yuasa are saturation divers, divers who avoid decompression by remaining inside a pressurized environment for up to 28 days at a time, breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium. When in the water, their lifeline is the set of umbilical cables that tether them to their diving bell and to the support ship above, and which carry breathing gases, power, communications and the hot water necessary to keep their suits warm in the near freezing sea.

On the day in question, diving veteran Allcock, played with seen-it-all, weathered wisdom by Harrelson, old hand Yuasa (Liu, displaying zen-like calm) and less experienced tyro Lemons (Peaky Blinders star Cole) are dropped into the sea by their support vessel, the Bibby Topaz, and descend inside their diving bell to a depth of around 300 feet to carry out a pipe repair on an oil rig manifold. With Allcock remaining inside the bell to monitor the work, Lemons and Yuasa dive down to the sea bed while the Dynamic Position System (DPS) on board the Bibby Topaz makes constant adjustments to hold the ship’s spot directly above them. The seas are heavy, the winds around 35 knots, but that shouldn't make a difference… until it does.

The Bibby Topaz suddenly loses its position and starts to drift. The DPS has malfunctioned. Alerted to the danger, Lemons and Yuasa attempt to make their way back to the diving bell, but Lemons’ umbilical gets snagged on the manifold. The full weight of the 8,000 tonne ship is now pulling against his lifeline and inevitably it snaps, leaving him with only around five minutes of air in his backup tank. As the crew on board the Bibby Topaz — including the ship’s captain (Cliff Curtis) and 1st officer (Myanna Buring) — strive to get the ship back into position, more than half an hour passes, leaving everyone involved convinced that their mission will turn out to be a body recovery rather than a rescue…

Parkinson stages all this with thrilling immediacy, cutting back and forth between the frantic activity on board the ship as it is tossed about by the surging swell and the actions of the divers beneath. If the story were fictional it would stretch credulity even further than Lemons' lifeline. Our knowledge that the events we are watching actually happened, tethers the film's desperate race-against-time narrative to the real world, but it doesn't make the unfolding drama any less suspenseful. Admittedly, the fact that the leading roles are played by a trio of stars slightly works against the film's realistic grain, but Cole, Liu and, even Harrelson (his character a bluff Yorkshireman in real life rather than a cool-headed American), give their characters a convincingly down-to-earth solidity. And when it comes to Cole’s imperiled Lemons, we feel even more keenly for his plight having seen his tender relationship with his fiancee Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) economically sketched in the film’s opening scenes. As for his colleagues, their stiff-upper-lipped camaraderie comes across vividly. All the same, be prepared to blub by the time the story reaches its incredible climax.

Last Breath is set to be released exclusively in movie theaters on Friday, February 28, 2025, in the US and March 14 in the UK.