Anyone who’s ever had to take a creative writing class knows that authors often defend their wildest, most unexpected plot twists with “Well, it happened that way.” Usually, the professor or someone would point out that narrative structure and reality are often incompatible regarding audience expectations: A deus ex machina that theoretically could happen isn’t typically a satisfying resolution. It feels fake and contrived, an insult tossed at the audience’s intelligence: writers and filmmakers must earn their miraculous resolutions, no matter how far-fetched. Well, at least they normally have to. Alex Parkinson made two films in six years, titled Last Breath, about a miraculous feat of survival — first as a documentary back in 2019 and then as a narrative feature hitting theaters today — and it’s understandable why he continues returning to this wellspring. There isn’t a Jonathan Frakes that pops up to say “we made it up” here — its circumstances are fact, ones nearly beyond belief — and Parkinson does a decent job translating the impossible reality into a compelling fictionalized narrative.
Last Breath is The Exorcist for people who are deathly afraid of drowning. It’s about a trio of saturation divers deployed from their ship to repair a bit of pipeline a few days away from the Scottish coast. This is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world in normal conditions: divers spend days in pressurized tubes, soaking in a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, before they’re sent to the ocean floor in a giant “diving bell” — a pod that serves as a forward operating base from which they can embark and return. It’s under heavy pressure itself, which means one team member doesn’t suit up and stays back to manage the massive bundle of tubes required for the other two divers to survive at depths of 300m (among them, there’s a nitrox tube for breathing, line that supplies power to their headlamps and comm devices, and a hose that pumps hot water through their suit — a godsend in the near-frozen conditions down there). You’re a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe, and these divers’ long careers are proof of their acumen and skill as professionals.
The same can’t be said for the companies they dive for — not the crews in the ships on the water, who support the divers, but the men back on land deciding when they will dive. Indeed, the events of Last Breath might not have happened had someone just paid proper attention to the weather report: a diving team is deployed to fix a key bit of pipeline in the middle of an awful squall. It’s not The Perfect Storm in terms of its surprise arrival, but it is a perfect storm of cascading catastrophes for the team. The two men in the water are David Yuasa (Simu Liu), an experienced diver with little time for sentiment, and the recently-promoted Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a Scotsman with a fiancée back home and a lot to live for; the man up in the bell is Duncan Alcock (Woody Harrelson), a soon-to-unwillingly-retire experienced hand. Within minutes of the two reaching the sea floor, the ship suffers a systems-wide failure of all the components needed to keep it in place for the diving team, and it starts to drift. David can make it to relative safety, but Chris’s tubes get caught on a piece of metal. For a few moments, he acts as the anchor for the entire ship until the cords snap, and he’s thrown in the opposite direction the boat drifts in. Chris has ten minutes of backup oxygen. He is almost certainly fucked.
Much of the film concerns his miraculous rescue and the quandaries the crew and his fellow divers are forced to confront. Think they can drop anchor? The captain points out that they could cause a massive environmental disaster in the process and still not be able to get him. Why not get their little drone/worklight to pick him up with its claws? Chris had the foresight to hook himself in so he wouldn’t drift away when he ran out of oxygen. It’s all very thorough, as you might expect from a director who’s made two films about this story. Being perhaps the single best authority on this situation aside from those involved in it, Parkinson can intelligently communicate information: there’s little of the exposition you’d expect in a film like this, and a whole lot of awe at the infrastructure in place to support these men — and the heroism required for Chris’ rescue. There’s no time for squabbling or infighting, after all. The clock is ticking. It’s a process picture filmed with astonishing accuracy (the underwater photography is worthy of specific praise, being, at times, truly haunting).
This is a smart approach, as grounding the film so heavily in its realistic qualities gives weight to the near-supernatural stroke of luck Chris has. When, after a series of gusty decisions made by the crew and his fellow divers, his presumed corpse is returned to the bell, it only takes a few puffs of mouth-to-mouth to restart his breathing. Even wilder is (and this isn’t a spoiler, given that there’s a whole documentary and plenty of contemporary news coverage about these events) what happens a few moments later. After a near half-hour without oxygen, Chris starts to speak, amazing his two co-workers. There hasn’t been a satisfactory scientific explanation for why the real Chris survived, and it’s a result as inherently baffling in context — played as such! — as it is when you try to explain it to others (if you have to drown, it seems, drown in frigid water). I think this firmly falls in “miracle” territory, and Last Breath rejoins the “stranger than fiction” scenario I outlined above: make your world as real as humanly possible, and even a deus ex machina won’t feel contrived. It’ll just be, simply, awesome.