Last Breath: Deeper Dive into Character Would Have Made Drama Stronger

By Liz Braun

Rating: B

Last Breath is a slender but affecting drama based on a real-life deep-sea diving incident.

In 2012, a harrowing situation unfolded after a diver was stranded, with limited oxygen, hundreds of feet below the surface of the North Sea. This fictional recreation is wonderfully claustrophobic, but the storytelling does not include enough character development to leave a viewer fully invested.

Last Breath has a great cast. Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, and Finn Cole play a three-man dive team tasked with fixing a pipe on the seabed off Aberdeenshire, Scotland. After an opening scrawl notes that the divers have one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, the movie introduces Chris Lemons (Cole), a keen young diver planning a wedding with his fiancé Morag (Bobby Rainsbury).

Duncan (Harrelson) is the older, experienced diver likely on his last assignment and Dave (Liu) is a reserved, somewhat cynical, all-business diver.

The film offers plenty of detail about the preparation required for the type of dive work the men will be doing. It shows off the tiny sub they will call home.

It also walks a viewer through the step-by-step process of the divers suiting up and attaching themselves to various heat and oxygen sources and life-supporting tethers before they descend into the cold, dark water in the diving bell.

It’s all so cramped and anxiety-provoking. Once the divers go in, the sight of one tiny light moving through the inky black water is bloody unnerving.

Up top in the mother ship, all is not entirely well (although now Cliff Curtis, Mark Bonnar and MyAnna Buring turn up in the story.) The ocean is very rough. When something malfunctions and the ship suddenly starts drifting, catastrophe unfolds for the divers beneath.

The upshot is that one of the divers is stranded hundreds of feet below the surface, and a complicated rescue mission begins. Everyone on the boat and everyone in the diving sub has a role to play in that mission.

But the unmoored diver only has minutes of oxygen left in his backup tank. It doesn’t look good.

For all its tense recreation of one diver’s terrifying experience, Last Breath fails to provide sufficient domestic detail about each of the men to make you truly care about their fate.

Maybe it’s over-familiarity with the material — director and co-writer Alex Parkinson has also made a documentary about the same incident.

The film moves straight from event to event, without devoting enough time to develop the sort of familiarity with the characters that would have raised the stakes while their fates were being decided. Never mind. The first half of Last Breath is gripping, even if it’s all eventually anticlimactic.

Last Breath. Directed by Alex Parkinson. Written by Mitchell LaFortune, Alex Parkinson and David Brooks. Starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, and Finn Cole. In theatres February 28.