“Based on a true story.” The label pops up so often at the beginning of a film that we gloss over it. The phrase, thanks to Fargo-esque cutesiness and omnipresence, is meaningless. Yet, with this story, the authenticity is the draw. Last Breath tells the extraordinary rescue mission of diver Chris Lemons, a man trapped underwater for 29 minutes without oxygen, who survived against unimaginable odds. The film doesn’t require any embellishment. The thrills are built into the story already. To help with authenticity, Alex Parkinson, the director behind the 2019 documentary, returns for the dramatization.
Chris (Finn Cole), David (Simu Liu), and Duncan (Woody Harrelson) are commercial divers who service oil supply equipment. The work is unforgiving, and the men and women who do it liken it to the hostility of space. Hundreds of feet below the ocean surface, their tether is the only source of oxygen, and any mistake could be their death. The three divers pride themselves on professionalism, eschewing ego in the face of countless obstacles that could go wrong.
Chris and David carry out repairs below the North Sea when thruster failure puts the ship at the whim of the ocean. When David, an experienced deep sea diver, sees Chris’s tether trapped in machinery, he kicks into analytical mode. He forces Chris to stop panicking and think about what he needs to do next. “Your umbilical: it’s gonna snap. I will come back for you.” Authentic chemistry between the three leads exudes through Cole, Liu, and Harrelson’s shared scenes. They feel like longtime buddies, and it raises the stakes when Chris’s life is on the line.
Just when you think you had a bad day at work, a film comes along that puts everything in perspective. It’s one thing to know standard procedure, but it’s another to sit in the cold and the dark, unsure if rescue will come. Rescue looks unlikely. Trapped on the seabed with five minutes of oxygen left, even David acknowledges, “It’s a body recovery now.” But Duncan believes they can bring Chris back. Unbeknownst to the crew, it’s Duncan’s last job, and he’ll be damned if his career ends in tragedy. Still, the conditions are horrible. The depth made the strain on his body ten times the normal atmospheric pressure, and crew members were a half hour away.
The underwater photography plays a huge part in immersing the viewer, and Parkinson isn’t afraid to put you in Chris’s head, plunging the camera into the inky black depths of the ocean with little light to guide the way. There are no John Williams music cues to tell you that sharks are nearby; you must keep your eyes peeled. The structures of both films are nearly identical. Yet the documentary couldn’t show all the factors that played into Chris’s accident due to budgetary and practical restraints—shipping vessels are expensive to render. 2025’s Last Breath can recreate conditions with CGI to show just how large the forces at play were that endangered Chris’s life.
Mercifully, everyone in a leadership position, like Duncan and Captain Jenson (Cliff Curtis), agrees on what needs to happen. The only drawback there is that leaves it leaves little tension to play out between actors. Liu has the unenviable task of playing David, who voices that Chris is unlikely to survive. Whether that makes it easier for him or is just a calculation, Liu’s portrayal won’t reveal, but it’s a highlight that Last Breath won’t tweak the story to become more palatable for wider audiences. Too often, characters make bad decisions because the script needs them to. These divers are good at their jobs because people die if they’re not. It’s refreshing to see professionalism depicted this way in a disaster movie.
The running time is fast, which is ideal because there isn’t a lot of meat on the narrative bone. The film focuses on telling Chris’s account. A technological error put Chris in danger, not recklessness or corporate malfeasance. Unlike Deepwater Horizon, Last Breath doesn’t leave the story to tackle corporate mistakes, so we sit with Chris. All the technology in the world can’t stop the ocean from doing what it wants, and Chris is at its mercy. Alone with his thoughts, Chris has nothing but time to sit and think this may be how he dies. It’s a nightmare worse than any horror film, and, at times, I had to remind myself to breathe.
Last Breath relies on emotion to drive the story forward. The bond between divers doesn’t need elaborating, but a memory of Chris with his fiancee Morag (a short though notable performance by Bobby Rainsbury) proves very moving. Parkinson feeds into the need for human connection with these scenes but smartly avoids the schmaltz that typically comes with a Hollywood adaptation of a true story. Admittedly, there is one scene where an IT guy we barely see onscreen reboots a server at just the right time, but as far as Hollywood dramatizations go, that’s a win.
