Last Breath

An account of a diving accident in the North Sea in 2012. Saturation divers work on gas lines on the seabed. The method: the divers live under pressure in a chamber for days, descend to the work in a bell, and stay tied to the ship by a line called an umbilical. That line means breath, warmth and communication. During the accident the ship's positioning system fails, the ship drifts and Chris Lemons's line parts. He is left alone below a hundred metres with the reserve cylinder on his back and a few minutes of air. The tension comes from there and rests entirely on process: the effort to regain the ship's position, the search by the remotely operated vehicle, and how long the team on the surface has to decide. The director Alex Parkinson had filmed the same event as a documentary in 2019; this is the fiction version of his own documentary. Woody Harrelson plays the veteran diver Duncan Allcock, Simu Liu plays David Yuasa and Finn Cole plays Chris Lemons. A tight example for anyone who likes survival thrillers drawn from record. For a viewer troubled by confined spaces and underwater scenes, the film takes place almost entirely in those two environments.