Blu-ray review: Taking a deep dive with 'Last Breath'
Underrated underwater thriller gets a proper physical release.
If it feels like I just wrote about “Last Breath,” I did. The movie whooshed through theaters at the end of February, was on VOD a few weeks later, and started streaming this week on Peacock as well as being available to buy on DVD/Blu-ray. Whoosh!
Now that it’s widely available to watch at home, I do hope people catch up with it. It’s a sturdy, old-fashioned based-on-a-true-story adventure that prizes authenticity over dazzle, with strong performances and a tight 93-minute running time.
The movie follows the true story of Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a “saturation diver” who goes deep into the depths of the North Sea to repair the pipelines that run along the ocean floor. The pipelines are so deep that the divers can’t just pop down from the surface and back up – they live for months in pressurized capsules that are like giant tin cans.
That’s scary enough when everything goes right, and “Last Breath” captures the murky uncertainty of life at the bottom of the sea. But then a freak combination of bad weather, equipment failure and bad luck leaves Chris stranded alone in the water with just a few minutes of oxygen. From there, the film stays mostly in real time as it follows the heroic and resourceful efforts of Chris’ fellow divers (Simi Liu and Woody Harrelson) and the crew of the ship back up on the surface to get him back.
When I first saw “Last Breath” in the theater, the big thing that struck me was how much the movie makes you feel like you’re deep underwater. On the Blu-ray’s commentary track, director Alex Parkinson and producer David Brooks (who wrote the screenplay with Mitchell LaFortune) discuss how they briefly flirted with the idea of shooting the film “dry-for-wet” – basically faking being underwater by putting the actors on harnesses and using light and smoke effects. (In “The Shape of Water,” Sally Hawkins and her fish-man weren’t actually kissing underwater.)
In the end, they opted to go for as much realism as possible. The underwater scenes in “Last Breath” were shot in a giant saltwater tank in Malta, with the actors 11 meters below the surface in real underwater gear. It’s a decision that really pays off in making the film suspenseful and cinematic – because it’s saltwater, you see all these particles floating in the water that really give the film texture.
That attention to detail and authenticity was key for Parkinson, who had made a documentary about Lemons’ story by the same name. By the time he came to make the fictionalized version, he had lived with this story for a decade, and knew every little piece of it, every tool that was in the diving bell, everything all the real-life characters were doing at every moment during the rescue. That knowledge makes the commentary track especially interesting as he weaves details from the real story with the challenges of making his first narrative feature.
Parkinson had never made a drama before – the first time he had ever worked with actors was on Day 2 of the “Last Breath” shoot. But the film is full of grounded, believable performances, especially Liu as the by-the-book senior diver and Harrelson as the grizzled father figure to Lemons.
On the commentary track, Brooks and Parkinson discuss how they expanded somewhat on the original story, deepening the emotional arcs of the characters and heightening some moments to build suspense. (An aborted attempt to rescue Lemons using an underwater drone was discussed in real life, but actually never attempted as it is in the film.)
I would have like to have known what went into the decision to let a documentary filmmaker like Parkinson make the Hollywood version, which feels like a real rarity. But it’s a choice that really pays off in “Last Breath.”