It does not take much to convince that, as an opening title card for Last Breath states, the job of a saturation diver is one of the most dangerous on earth. The facts, also summarily listed in the survival thriller’s introduction, speak for themselves: thousands of miles of pipeline traverse the ocean, dependent on human divers to maintain them; said divers spend days in pressurized chambers to reach depths of more than 1,000ft (300 meters), in near-freezing darkness. It may as well be outer space, as the fiancee of one diver bluntly but correctly puts it.
Thankfully, Last Breath, Alex Parkinson’s feature film adaptation of his 2019 documentary of the same name, lets the divers’ work – a maze of levers, pulleys, gas valves, imposing machines and the human capacity to detach from existential risk – largely speak for itself as well. And luckily for viewers, such work, baffling to anyone with a reasonable relationship with adrenaline, is fascinating even if nothing goes awry.
This being a movie, you can safely assume things will. Based on real catastrophic events during a would-be routine pipeline fix 3,000ft below the surface of the North Sea in 2012, Last Breath is a gripping disaster flick of routine, improvisation and unfathomable experience – the participants shockingly cool under pressure, as the viewer descends into deep, deep stress. (Having spent some time in the YouTube rabbit hole that is “giant wave hits oil rig”, I’m with diver fiancee Morag, played by Bobby Rainsbury: “Humans shouldn’t be at the bottom of the North Sea.”)
Nevertheless, humans persist in going places incompatible with life. The story has been out there for awhile, but it’s best to avoid googling, if possible, to feel the full, stomach-dropping shock of events one stormy late night in September, off the coast of Aberdeen. Though bookended by too brief, too cliched on-land interludes, Last Breath is a process film that summarily gets down to business: Scottish diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a relatively green and eager recruit, books a multi-day job fixing pipeline required to heat Scotland’s homes in the winter. The workers are split into teams of three – Chris and Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu), a near-emotionless diver whose reputation for hyper-competency that precedes him, don the thick suits for work on the seafloor rig, while Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), a 20-year veteran with a folksy, distinctly Harrelson-y affect, supervises from an underwater control hub known as the “bell”.
The documentary origins shine through. With swelling, convincingly majestic music, Last Breath lavishes on the details of this particular trade that remains unseen and unknown by the vast majority of people – mechanical thrusters, computer systems that beep and boop the ship into place, the buttons pushing “heliox” gas (a mixture of helium and oxygen) into the divers’ chambers so they can acclimatize, some crew members’ tan Crocs, the multicolor tangle of “umbilical cords” that provide divers breathable air, heat and critical contact with the bell. Much of Last Breath, in routine and in disaster, is believably and satisfyingly workaday in a trade that would be, for many, their worst nightmare. The film gets plenty of mileage from footage, whether cinematic or relayed through the ship’s complex system of cameras, of divers jumping into an abyss so dark you cannot see a hand, or a rescue, right in front of your face.
I clearly do not want to spoil anything, so tightly was I gripped by the specter of danger before and after crisis arrives. But suffice to say, an accident occurs that plunges the audience into the experience of oxygen deprivation in one of the most remote and truly inhospitable environments on earth, where every move walks a razor’s edge of death. I pulled out several hairs. There are few things as chilling as an oxygen countdown clock and, even worse, a “time without oxygen” count-up. Parkinson maintains a tight, 360-degree grip on the devolving situation; the film weaves seamlessly between diver, bell and ship, between situational cameras and filmic ones – a tricky task, given that much of the action occurs in pitch black, with characters rendered unrecognizable in heavy gear. Liu, Cole and Harrelson are admittedly given very little material outside the range of work or triage mode, but all three deliver performances deserving of their characters’ straitened competency – controlled, complementary, not distracting from the improbable task at hand.
Once that task is over, however, the film quickly deflates. If only Parkinson applied the same rigor and curiosity to an assumedly bewildering aftermath as he did to process. But aside from a brief coda that is jarringly almost romcom, said process makes up 90% of the movie, which is for the best. Riveting, seamless, at points genuinely shocking, Last Breath exemplifies the possibilities of human collaboration – a feat that has stuck with me and, yes, took my breath away.
Last Breath is in US and UK cinemas on 28 February
