There are a handful of potentially lethal jobs out there that require nerves of purest iron to negotiate, but just narrowly edging out bomb diffusing and working retail at Christmas are the men and women who find themselves donning clunky diving gear to travel to the depths of the North Sea in order to work maintenance on the gas lines that keep everyone fed and toasty warm.
Back in 2012, a trio of divers got into some literal deep water when a freak accident left one of their number stranded on the ocean floor with precious little oxygen to sustain himself. Fast forward to 2019 and documentary filmmakers Alex Parkinson and Richard de Costa made Last Breath, a harrowing account of the events that transpired told by those that used genuine footage and audio to try and put you in the diving boots of those that were there. But in an interesting turn of events, Alex Parkinson has returned to the story once again to deliver a feature film account of what happened. Does the accident still have what it takes to catch the breath in your lungs, or has the filmmaker simply dived too deep into the story for his own good?
If you think a stint at work is bad where you work, spare a thought for the poor buggers who risk their lives diving to the bottom of the inky black and utterly freezing ocean to tinker with gas lines in order to keep them working right. Three such men are Duncan Allcock, David Yuasa and Chris Lemons who are all about to start a brand new rotation in their frequently hellish job and after seeing the latter say goodbye to his wife-to-be, Morag, the trio begin the long process that preps them to work 300 feet below sea level.
For a start, the group has to live in a metal tube the size of a mid-priced caravan in order to remain at the accurate amount of pressurisation for the entirely of their four week rotation. From here, the men are transported to the suffocating depths at the bottom of the North Sea by a diving Bell and while the senior Duncan remains inside to monitor their safety lines and oxygen, rookie Chris and super serious David slip on their diving gear and get to work on a gas line manifold. However, while a huge storm rages on the surface, matters immediately get serious when the automatic system that keep the ship locked in one place fails, the ship starts to violently drift from where it’s supposed to be. This means it starts to drag the attached diving bell along with it and in turn, this means Chris and David are going on a stomach churning ride.
In the chaos, Chris finds that his umbilical is caught on the manifold and inevitably snaps under the immense strain. Now without light, communication or an infinite amount of oxygen, the diver only has around ten minutes of reserve air to keep him alive, but a rescue mission can’t even start until the ship stop drifting ever further away. With all hands above and below the surface of the sea struggling to trouble shoot, time ticks away abd soon it becomes a ghoulish toss up as to whether this rescue mission will instead become a body retrieval. And you thought your job sucked.
Solid is the name of the game here, because while Last Breath certainly has a knuckle gnawing premise and some fairly impressive execution, what we truly have with this film is the cinematic equivalent at a professional doing its job effectively and efficiently with precious little time for bells, whistles or flare. The performances, cinematography and direction are all steady as a rock and does the absolute necessary to get its point across about how making a living on the sea bed is indescribably tough. However, beyond the disaster movie premise and the fact that it’s based on real events, there’s nothing overtly spectacular or exemplary about Last Breath other than all involved carry themselves much like the men and women featured in the film – with workman like precision.
The movie requires Woody Harrelson to act like a grizzled father figure and throw out banter between musing about his upcoming forced retirement, Simu Liu to be an intense professional and Finn Cole (when he’s not unconscious and spasming due to oxygen deprivation) to be the wide eyed rookie with a worried fiancé waiting at home – so they all do exactly that; no more, no less. This, of course, is perfectly fine and leaves the more epic showboating to the likes of Deepwater Horizon and it’s peers, but while the economical nature of the production means that a great deal of the story is taken up with spelling out exactly what it means to do this job, when the disaster happens the movie provides some genuinely tense scenes.
The problem lis that even though the disaster stuff is ably handled and you get a real feel for what it means to be entombed in the murky darkness of the North Sea, there’s not a lot of true emotion floating about the place when it comes to these characters as actual people. We don’t have time to care about Duncan Allcock as a person, so we care about him because he’s played by Woody Harrelson and similarly we root for Simu Liu to lighten up a bit because we’ve seen him play Shang-Chi and even though this casting shorthand helps save time on charactisation, it means that some of the interactions can be a little one dimensional and overly simple.
That’s not to say that Last Breath doesn’t cause you to find a bit of air caught in your chest yourself, because when the film ditches the mawkish introductions, we get a pretty engrossing “dad movie” that soon gets into the swing of detailing all the shit these guys have to go through to pay the bills. I’m not sure what their take home is after tax, but it better had be substantial enough to warrant living in a fucking pressurised tube with two other dude for four weeks so you don’t fucking explode when you pop out for a hard day’s dive.
When the disaster occurs, Parkinson shifts into more comfortable territory as he makes the ticking clock of Chris’ oxygen levels the main priority and it’s impossible not to feel your chest tighten at the sight of a man trapped in such a creepily inhospitable environment. As we cross cut between the crew of the drifting ship, the two divers confined to the diving bell and POV shots of the aquatic drone as it keeps an eye on the fast expiring Chris, the tension builds as everyone pitches in in their own way.
But while Last Breath delivers solid thrills, it ultimately isn’t hugely memorable and doesn’t seem like the kind of experience that would warrant much of a rewatch somewhere down the road. There’s nothing here that’s at all bad, but similarly there’s nothing here that makes the film truly stand out beyond its fittingly tight runtime and to recall this movie after you’ve seen it might require some deep diving of your own.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 