LAST BREATH (2025)
Starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, Cliff Curtis, Djimon Hounsou, Mark Bonnar, MyAnna Buring, Josef Altin, Bobby Rainsbury, Connor Reed, Nick Biadon, Riz Khan, Aldo Silvio, Kevin Naudi, Claudiu Baciu, Brett Murray, Muhammad Arnini Bin Ariffin, Yaroslav Musii, Ramon Camilleri, Daithí O'Donnell and Christian Scicluna.
Screenplay by Mitchell LaFortune and Alex Parkinson & David Brooks.
Directed by Alex Parkinson.
Distributed by Focus Features. 88 minutes. Rated PG-13.
The Last Breath is a sharp piece of no-nonsense filmmaking, a based-on-a-true-story thriller which gets in, tells its taut story and gets out. All in about an hour and a half. No frills, no extraneous characters, no celebrity moments, no narrative side-tracks. Just a real, human story of survival.
It is much better than you’d expect. Of course, it is telling a very gripping story.
This story has already been told on film – with a 2019 documentary of the same title, and the director of this version is also the co-director of the doc. It is rather shocking (in a good way) how much the narrative version of Last Breath resembles a documentary.
It is the story of a group of Scottish deep-sea divers who take a gig going down to do some work on a pipeline hundreds of feet below sea level. These saturation divers are specialists, used to going down and dealing with the cold, the pressure, and even having days or weeks after the job going through a decompression protocol.
Last Breath mostly focuses on one of a few groups of these divers on the mission. Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) is the aging diver who is being aged out of the program by the corporation, going on his last job. David Yuasa (Simu Liu) is the standoffish superstar of the crew. Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) is a younger local, on one of his first trips, who is taking the job to afford to get married to his love.
All goes sideways when an accident sets Lemons adrift from the pod, and his crew – as well as the crew of the ship above the water – have to race time to save the young crew member before he runs out of oxygen and succumbs to the temperatures and the sea pressure.
The cast is mostly made up of talented Scottish actors who are little-known in the US, with only Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Djimon Hounsou having any sort of international recognition. And yet, neither of them distracts from the story. Harrelson attempts a Scottish accent briefly early on, but eventually just sounds like normal old Woody, which is fine, he’s always a welcome presence on screen.
Last Breath is a taut, realistic story with real-world consequences and no appetite for useless spectacle. It makes for some surprisingly bracing viewing.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: February 28, 2025.
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