Major spoilers ahead for Last Breath. You’ve been warned.
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Diving has always been a risky business. At the deepest depths humans can tolerate, diving has often been compared to going into space as far as its dangers. And one of the most treacherous places on Earth to work is the North Sea. In 2012, these circumstances combined to set the stage for a terrifying accident. The documentary Last Breath (2019) detailed the fantastic story – and now, it’s been made into a movie. Does the flick do better than the doc? Read on to find out.
Last Breath begins in Scotland with diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) saying goodbye to his fiancée Morag (Bobby Wainsbury). They’re only months away from getting married and are in the middle of building a house. Morag’s naturally worried about Chris, but he’s excited to go, as he’s fairly new to saturation diving. Morag makes him promise to call or send a video every day.
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Chris heads out to the port in Aberdeenshire to the dive support vessel he’ll be living on for the next month. He meets up with his mentor, Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), who’ll also be with him during the dive. They’ll be one of three teams, and the other member of their team is Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu). Famous for being non-verbal and unemotional, he’s known as “The Vulcan.”
Chris isn’t sure how it’s going to be living in such close quarters with Dave, but Duncan assures him that Dave is the best. Duncan also assures Dave that Chris is good to go despite his inexperience.
Saturation diving means the divers and their bellman (the diver who stays inside and assists the others) must live in a tiny habitat together. But even though the habitats are on the ship, the guys inside might as well be on the moon. Once the habitats become pressurized to equal the diving depth (called the “blowdown”), the divers won’t come out until the job is done. And at the end of the gig, they’ll still have to stay inside for four additional days to decompress.
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Every diver makes sure to bring only the essentials – pictures of loved ones, books, music. For Duncan, that also means a special pillow and a bag full of candy bars – one for every day. And for Chris, that means a couple of bottles of hot sauce to make up for what the ship’s kitchen lacks.
The ship heads out into the North Sea to the job site where the divers will be doing repairs on a stretch of pipeline. On the bridge is Capt. Jenson (Cliff Curtis), first officer Hanna (MyAnna Buring), dive supervisor Craig (Mark Bonnar), an unnamed tech guy (Josef Altin) and an unnamed ROV pilot (Connor Reed). When they arrive at the job site location, they use a computerized system called “dynamic positioning” to lock the ship in place.
Duncan’s team is up and gets into the diving bell that will drop them down to the job site. Chris and Dave suit up and drop down into the water, starting a six-hour shift. Dave instructs Chris to follow his lead, and Duncan reminds a nervous Chris to slow his breathing down while he unspools the umbilical cable attached to both divers. The umbilical cable provides not only breathing gas (called “heliox”) but also light, communications and warm water that flows through their suits.
While they begin to work down on the seabed, up top, the bridge crew gets the latest weather report. It’s not great – there’s a storm inbound with heavy winds, which will also mean huge swells. Capt. Jenson tells Craig, and they both agree it’s borderline. But Craig thinks they can work through it. After all, it is the North Sea, and bad weather is just par for the course.
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Not long after, though, the dynamic positioning system malfunctions. And not just one or two little things here or there – the whole system crashes. As the ship starts drifting out of position, Craig tells Duncan to get Chris and Dave back inside the bell immediately.
The storm hits, and the winds and huge swells send the ship even farther off course. As Duncan tries to pull the guys back in, Dave tells Chris they have to climb to the top of the structure they’re working on (called a “manifold”), using the umbilicals as rope to climb back up. Dave gets to the top, but Chris’ umbilical snags on part of the manifold, and he’s stuck, still partway down.
Meanwhile, the ship drifts farther and farther away, stretching the umbilicals to their limit. Dave reaches for Chris, but he doesn’t have enough cable. Realizing what’s about to happen, Dave tells Chris he’ll come back for him. But he needs to get himself onto the top of the manifold. That’s the only way they’ll be able to find him.
As Dave gets back up into the diving bell, Chris’ umbilical unravels and then snaps. Chris falls back down onto the seabed, now completely in the dark. And all he has left to breathe is what’s in his two bailout tanks, enough for maybe five minutes.
Back up on the ship, Capt. Jenson tries to figure out how to get back to the site. The tech guy says they’ve never experienced a total crash on the DP system. The only thing he can think to do is a hard reset, but it could take hours for all the systems to come back online.
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Capt. Jenson tells him he’d better come up with a workaround, like now. In the meantime, he’ll try to get the ship back on course by manually controlling the ship’s thrusters – but he can’t do it alone. First officer Hanna needs to be working half of the thrusters while he controls the other half, which is a tricky proposition.
Meanwhile, down below, Chris pops a flare to help him see. But it’s so murky he can barely see anything, and his compass isn’t working, either. But he has to move, so he picks a direction and goes – and this time, luck is on his side. He finds the manifold and slides in between its sections, holding onto whatever he can to help him climb. By the time Chris manages to get to the top of the manifold, his bailouts have run dry. All he can do is lay there, wait – and probably die.
On the ship, the tech guy’s figured out a workaround and goes to the computer room to unravel the plate of spaghetti that’s all the cabling. Craig has the ROV guy send the drone back to the site to find Chris.
By the time the ROV finds the manifold and Chris on top of it, it’s been over 20 minutes since Chris has run out of breathing gas. They see his body twitching, and Craig assumes it’s just reflexes. He’s gotta be dead. Craig uses the ROV’s arms and pincers to grab hold of him and pull him out. But he realizes Chris has tethered himself to the manifold with a carabiner so he wouldn’t drift – a smart move.
Minutes later – and by this time, it’s been 30 minutes – the tech guy holds his breath as he presses the power button. Nothing happens. He does one more frenzied fix on the cabling and tries it again. This time, the system powers up. Capt. Jenson hurries to get the ship properly positioned again. Inside the diving bell, Dave gets his helmet back on and drops back into the water.
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Dave secures Chris to his suit and climbs the umbilical back to the bell. It’s a Herculean effort on Dave’s part, requiring all his considerable upper body strength to carry their combined weight. He gets to the bell and pushes Chris inside, where Duncan grabs him. Duncan takes Chris’ helmet off and sees he’s blue and cold. Duncan gives him a couple of deep rescue breaths, but there’s no sign of life.
Dave gets up into the bell and tries talking to Chris, being unusually friendly. Still no response. Duncan breaks down, wondering how he’s going to tell Morag that Chris is dead. Then suddenly, they hear Chris’ voice, asking Dave if he’s alright. In total shock, they see Chris not only breathing but alert. Against all odds, he seems to be okay. Everyone on the bridge cheers and hugs, and then Capt. Jenson takes the ship back to port.
Once back in Aberdeenshire, the divers endure four days of decompression. Duncan and Dave take turns tending to Chris, checking his vitals and keeping him warm in one of the bunks. When he finally gets home to Morag, she asks what happened to cut the job short. Chris tries saying that there was an “accident” with one of the divers. But Morag just looks at Chris and knows that it was him. She’s understandably upset – nevertheless, she would never discourage him from doing what he loves.
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Amazingly, all’s well that ends well, and Chris and Morag get married. And not even a full month after the accident, Chris, Dave and Duncan are all back out in the North Sea to finish the job. And while the doctors who cared for Chris assume that the combination of hypothermia and the amount of oxygen absorbed into Chris’ bloodstream kept him alive, they still can’t say for sure how Chris managed to survive with no ill effects.
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So there’s really not much to say about Last Breath. It is what it is – a short, big-budget reconstruction of a real event. It’s done well. The underwater cinematography is especially good, and the actors all turn in decent performances. And it does make for a scary, cautionary tale that would make anyone think twice about being a deep-sea diver. The moment Chris’ umbilical snaps and the audience is plunged into darkness and complete silence drew gasps from everyone, including me. When Chris was found, rescued and regained consciousness, it was a moment for big cheers.
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I was interested enough to watch the original documentary when I got home. While the movie of course made changes to the actual events to make things more dramatic and emotional, I didn’t mind it. Especially the fact that breathing heliox would’ve made everybody sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. That would’ve been really annoying to listen to. And Woody Harrelson doesn’t even try to fake a British accent, but that’s probably best.
So it’s really a question of how you want the story of Last Breath told to you. Would you rather just have the facts and watch interviews with the actual people? Or would you rather see it dramatized and ride the wave (no pun intended) of emotion? Either way, the story of Last Breath is an incredible one that makes you admire the mettle of people who do this kind of dangerous work, and makes you stop and think about the existence of miracles.
Directed by: Alex Parkinson
Written by: Mitchell LaFortune, Alex Parkinson, David Brooks
Release date: Feb 28, 2025
Rating: PG-13
Run time: 1hr, 33min
Distributor: Focus Features
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