Last Breath (2025) Review: One-Note Survival Thriller

While beautifully shot, Last Breath has difficulty justifying why the 2019 documentary of the same name needed to be turned into a feature film.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin sadly fell through many traps while making Nyad, their first fiction filmmaking attempt, and the same occurred when Joshua Oppenheimer released The End last year. Now, it’s Alex Parkinson’s turn to attempt this seemingly difficult task with the feature adaptation of his 2019 documentary, Last Breath. 

The Last Breath documentary recounted the harrowing story of Chris Lemons, a saturation diver who was involved in a terrifying accident that left him underwater without oxygen for over half an hour after his umbilical cable detached itself. It wasn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it got the job done in making us care about him and the race against time for his partners, Duncan Allcock and Dave Yuasa, to recover his body before the unthinkable occurs amidst violent weather conditions. 

Having brought the documentary to life with co-director Richard Da Costa, Parkinson would seem to be the best person to tell Chris’ story once again via the Hollywood treatment to a broader audience. In the documentary, Parkinson staged recreations of the event when archival footage wasn’t available to illustrate just how dangerous Chris’ situation underwater was and how his chances of survival were extremely slim, if not scientifically impossible. That makes his skillset particularly interesting when staging the same sequences, though with a bigger budget and sense of scale for a massive motion picture. Unfortunately, the 2025 feature film lacks the kind of attachment that would make this blockbuster treatment essential to watch.

In the documentary, with the few bits of archival footage Parkinson showcased of Chris exploring the ship and of Duncan and David speaking to him in the past tense, we immediately connect with him and hope that, when the accident arrives, he has survived, no matter if the possibilities are stacked against him. In the fiction film, Parkinson (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks) gives little to no reason for us to care about Chris (Finn Cole) or his teammates. The videos we saw of him in the documentary speaking to his fiancée, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), had a much more intimate connection in such little time than the fleeting scenes we have with her in the live-action movie, replacing moments of raw humanity with rudimentary exposition to contextualize why he has to leave her behind for some time.

The first half of the movie, while attempting to establish a “blockbuster” aesthetic through the staggering photography of Nick Matthews (and Ian Seabrook, responsible for the underwater scenes), feels like a documentary. The dialogue spoken by characters who explain to the protagonist what their dangerous job entails is so matter-of-fact that it feels plucked straight out of what the subjects of Parkinson’s 2019 film were saying. It feels far too robotic and overexpository for human beings to utter dialogues like these, which may likely be a challenge of transitioning from explaining things in a documentary to translating them in a digestible fashion for a feature film. The gist of the job is quite simple: Chris, Duncan (Woody Harrelson), and David (Simu Liu) are tasked to repair a pipeline 100 meters below the surface of the North Sea, a routine operation that many saturation divers are familiar with but still remains very hazardous. 

Meanwhile, the ship, manned by Captain Andre Jenson (Cliff Curtis), suffers a malfunction in its positioning system caused by rough seas. Because of this, the conditions underwater to safely perform the repair job have deteriorated, leading Duncan to urgently tell David and Chris to drop everything and return to their diving chamber. David safely comes back, but Chris’ umbilical cable is stuck until it breaks. He is now stranded underwater, with no light or guiding system to help him swim back to safety and only ten minutes of oxygen left in his tank. 

The rest of the movie is a paint-by-numbers rescue mission, alternating between Duncan and Dave strategizing in the saturation chamber to assess what the best way to recover Chris entails. At the same time, we also follow the Captain and his officers trying to reposition the ship amidst the violent weather. These individual setpieces are decently mounted and beautifully shot, especially when Parkinson cuts to exterior views of the ship plowing through one large wave after the next. The immersive (and purposefully loud) sound design thrusts us into the middle of this distressing event, where everything doesn’t go according to plan, and everyone has to come together to rescue the one person who fights for his life underwater. 

One major highlight that wasn’t in the documentary involves Chris attempting to climb a structure to get on the manifold with only a flare to help him figure out where exactly it is. Seabrook’s underwater photography is frequently jaw-dropping in that specific moment and heightens the stakes. Scenes like these add just enough tension for us to latch onto the protagonist and care about whether he will make it out of the North Sea alive because Cole’s portrayal of the character simply doesn’t give us enough compelling reasons to root for his survival or care about the precious relationship he has with his homebound fiancée who is given nothing to do, while in the documentary, has a much more significant impact. 

Cole doesn’t have the same ineffable charm as the real-life Lemons (whom we see via an archival video before the end credits, a completely different personality trait than how the Peaky Blinders actor approaches him). Before his accident, Chris was full of life and enjoyed every minute he spent doing what he loved, regardless of his job’s risks. He wouldn’t want to be anywhere else – and still doesn’t! Cole never represents him at his best, either in his (paper-thin) relationship with Morag or in the joys he experiences diving in the deep sea. His portrayal feels distanced from what Chris Lemons is depicted in the documentary. As a result, we’re always at arm’s length with the protagonist, even after seeing everything that has happened to him underwater. 

Harrelson and Liu do their best to give their characters some traits that could make the audience relate to them. Props to Simu Liu for making Dave Yuasa more human and compassionate than how he was depicted in the documentary. Sadly, it isn’t enough for us to emotionally connect with them on a deeper level than the one-note attributes they’re stuck with. The decision to make Duncan Allcock American is another problem in and of itself. However, Harrelson is a decent enough actor that it becomes less of an issue than it would’ve been had Parkinson picked someone else who doesn’t imbue Allcock with the emotional textures given by the movie’s most famous A-lister. 

Comparing a fiction film to a documentary seems futile, but knowing what happens to Chris still doesn’t make the feature version of Last Breath any less predictable. The deafening score by Paul Leonard-Morgan gives the movie many button-pushing emotional notes and primes the audience to what ultimately happens to the character. It’s almost a spoiler in and of itself if you’ve not heard of Lemons’ incredible story (which many people haven’t), especially during the climax, where the music directly tells us how to feel and how the movie will wrap up. It also doesn’t help that there’s far too much music, which never allows the harrowingly captured, petrifying scenes of peril to speak for themselves with the occasional moments of raw silence they give to the viewer. 

Parkinson will play with silence in one crucial moment that made me gasp in total shock, but it’s the only one in his feature. There should’ve been a more focused use of silence to exacerbate tension and less of an overbearing score, which sadly takes hold of the intricate soundscape and tangible suspense the filmmaker wants to create. It also doesn’t help that, as inspiring as his documentary’s conclusion was, the film’s ending feels tacked-on and emotionally hollow. That’s obviously not the intended effect, but it’s what happens when you have a profoundly miscast lead and a thinly developed script that never allows the audience to peer into any of the characters’ deeply personal and emotional stories, contrary to how they were painted in the documentary. 

As a result, Last Breath only goes so far before it ceases to hold our breaths in the momentary times we are on the edge of our seats in figuring out if Chris will survive this story or not. While the documentary was slightly shorter than the feature, it gives us a more complete – and satisfying – portrait of this emotional journey than the movie ever will. Perhaps Parkinson’s screenwriting and directing skills will improve with his next fiction project. However, today is not the day when a documentarian successfully made the jump to fiction filmmaking.

Last Breath (2025) will be released in US & Canadian theaters and in UK & Irish cinemas on February 28, 2025.