Last Breath

How does this sound for a tale of screen sur­vival? A deep sea div­er is strand­ed at the bot­tom of the North Sea. No light. No warmth. Five min­utes worth of oxy­gen left in the tank. The pres­sure is 10 times what we nor­mal­ly expe­ri­ence on land. Assis­tance is over 30 min­utes away. Mak­ing it out alive is unlikely.

Richard da Cos­ta and Alex Parkinson’s doc­u­men­tary Last Breath chron­i­cles this very sce­nario as expe­ri­enced by com­mer­cial div­er, Chris Lemons. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it fails to make much of an emo­tion­al impact, the direc­tors strug­gling to stretch the mate­r­i­al out across a fea­ture-length run­time. The film unrav­els at such a slow pace that it is dif­fi­cult to main­tain inter­est in Lemons’ sur­vival story.

One redeem­ing fea­ture is the sud­den change in nar­ra­tion which gives us Lemons’ per­spec­tive. Although even he admits that, due to him los­ing con­scious­ness almost imme­di­ate­ly, there isn’t much to report. This ele­ment of the film uses uncon­vinc­ing recon­struc­tion footage to depict him strug­gling on the sea floor, which has the mis­er­able effect of mak­ing his account feel less than genuine.

That said, the film is not with­out intrigue as the sit­u­a­tion is so bizarre and ter­ri­fy­ing that it often appears more like a work fic­tion. Talk­ing heads pro­voke the most reac­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the con­trast­ing reports from the mem­bers of Lemons’ div­ing crew: Dave Yuasa views the job of res­cu­ing Lemons with lit­tle empa­thy or anx­i­ety, while Dun­can All­sock is com­plete­ly emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed in the task.

The use of archive footage from the ves­sels attempt­ing to recov­er Lemons pro­vides a cer­tain lev­el of authen­tic­i­ty while con­vey­ing the intense fear and claus­tro­pho­bia felt by every­one involved – but it’s not enough. The gaps in the stretched out plot are filled in with spe­cial­ist details about deep sea div­ing which, while some­times enter­tain­ing, add lit­tle to the devel­op­ment of the sto­ry itself.