Deepest Fear
The survival thriller goes underwater in documentarian alex Parkinson’s feature spin on a thoroughly unlikely rescue.
Last Breath
Director: Alex Parkinson • Writers: Mitchell LaFortune, Alex Parkinson, David Brooks
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Finn Cole, Simu Liu, Cliff Curtis
USA • 1hr 33mins
Opens Hong Kong May 8 • IIA
Grade: B
Much to our everlasting detriment, humans as a species are masters of surviving some of the most harrowing, gawdawful and entirely unfathomable dilemma imaginable and living to tell us about what should be, scientifically and medically speaking, impossible. Case in point, deep sea saturation diver Chris Lemons’s 2012 logic-defying recovery after severing a crucial umbilical cable and getting stuck on the ocean floor (okay, fine, 100 metres down) without oxygen for half an hour. You read that right: 30 minutes, no air. We were all taught in Biology 101 that if we don’t breathe air for five minutes – max – it’s game over. The time it takes to watch some episodes of The Mandalorian should kill anyone, and the fact it didn’t puts Lemons up there with the unlikely survival stories recounted in 127 Hours (buddy cuts off his own arm after being caught in a cavern for, uh, 127 hours), Apollo 13 (three buddies get trapped in space with a failing spacecraft and have to find a way not to incinerate on re-entry), Gravity (buddy gets trapped in deep space on a failing craft after a catastrophic space junk strike), The 33 (many buddies get trapped in a collapsed Chilean mine for 69 days) and the doc Touching the Void (about mountaineering buddies who nearly die descending the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes). Beyond reason, all these people survived their real or fictional ordeals. Last Breath is Alex Parkinson’s dramatic film based on his and Richard da Costa’s 2019 doc of the same name about Lemons.
This is as about action packed as it gets
What Last Breath lacks in veracity it makes up for in solid, reliable, workmanlike tension, something the documentary sometimes lacked. Here we start the adventure (ahem) with Chris (Finn Cole, Peaky Blinders) at home with his fiancée Morag getting on with their days, the couple debating the usual things: the job makes her nervous, he’s just about to get put on better rotation, can’t he do something else, etc and so on. Chris heads off for his four-week rotation maintaining natural gas pipelines in the North Sea with his crew, Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) and David Yuasa (Simu Liu). Both are considerbly more experienced than he is, and Duncan is about to retire (uh oh). Chris and David climb out of their specially pressurised diving bell to get to work, tethered to it by oxygen-supplying umbilicals and monitored by Duncan.
Meanwhile, on the surface, Cliff Curtis does another version of his competent, dependable South Pacifican seaman (Deep Rising, The Fountain, Sunshine, The Megs, Avatar: The Way of Water) as Captain Andre Jenson, who’s there to support the divers. But a serious North Sea storm kicks up and throws the ship off course – dragging the bell behind it. David scrambles back to the bell just in time, but Chris is stranded on some kind of pipeline infrastructure with no light, no comms and no air past the 10 minutes’ worth he has. If that weren’t kick in the teeth enough, the ship’s fancy tracking software fritzes out and they can’t even locate him.
Last Breath would be prime second screen material were it not for some decent performances – slightly surly looks good on Liu, who seems to have gotten over himself and has been totally enjoyable in his last two outings, Harrelson does Harrelson – efficient storytelling and a genuine build-up of tension that’s diametrically opposed to how much we know about how this all ends. It has that in common with Apollo 13 too, and kudos to anyone who can mine suspense from a known property. There’s not much to examine in Last Breath; Parkinson’s not here to interrogate the invisible human and obvious environmental cost of our dependence on power supplies so we can stay warm/cool while sitting in the living room in our underwear, creating AI memes for Instagram. It’s exactly the survival tale you think it’s going to be and the sturdy time-filler you might want or need on another soupy day. You could do worse.