I always miss filmmaker Tony Scott. The man behind features like Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, and the 2010 masterpiece Unstoppable had such a unique, rapid-fire approach to cinema. Rarely did shots last long in his movies while tedium was similarly scarce in his greatest works. How could one not miss such a distinctive and gifted filmmaker? However, as I sat in my Last Breath screening, I especially yearned for Scott’s prowess. The mind reels at what he could’ve done, even just in terms of imagery, with this rescue mission premise. He might have brought some energy to a production desperately needing some Unstoppable magic.
Writer/director Alex Parkinson (who penned the script with Michell LaFortune and David Brooks) adapts his 2019 documentary Last Breath for this 2025 film, which concerns diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole). This man works an incredibly trying job at fixing underground oil pipes. It's not a gig for the faint of heart, though the ones that do it, like Lemons pal Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), love it. On a routine mission underwater with stern experienced diver David Yuasa (Simu Liu), something goes horribly wrong.
Factors like stormy weather leave Lemons stranded at the bottom of the ocean. Thanks to how choppy the waters are, it looks like all hope is lost. “This is now a body recovery operation” Yuasa tells Allcock once he gets back inside their pod. This elder diver, though, just won’t have it. There’s got to be a way to save Lemons. Meanwhile, at depths of the ocean that no man was meant to venture to, Lemons tries to follow Yuasa's instructions to get back to a pick-up point. All the while, he thinks of his fiancé Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) and how much he yearns to embrace her once more.
Documentary filmmakers jumping into narrative films is always a fascinating exercise. It’s especially interesting to see what production they’ll use as their inaugural dive into scripted cinema. The Act of Killing helmer Joshua Oppenheimer, for example, plunged into post-apocalyptic musical The End, a choice that far removed him from his earlier works. Director RaMell Ross, meanwhile, expanded on the distinctive heightened visuals of his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening to extraordinary new heights with last year's Nickel Boys. Parkinson, meanwhile, opts to do a narrative film version of a real-life story he already covered in a documentary format. That’s a bit more of a lateral move artistically.
While someone like Ross embraced imagery and emotional beats you simply couldn’t get in a documentary, Parkinson’s filmmaking on 2025’s Last Breath remains very reserved and forgettable. The only interesting visual flourish he and cinematographer cinematographers Nick Remy Matthews and Ian Seabrook bring to the table is occasional shots told through security cameras capturing three men in tight decompression chambers, the undersea floor, or the ship's tormented front. These images have a slightly more compressed aspect ratio and are noticeably static in movement.
That latter quality makes sights like terrifying waves cascading on top of a ship extra unsettling. The camera can’t go anywhere, so it feels like the audience is also trapped here. It’s also the kind of footage a documentary might not be able to procure, since raw security camera images may be inaccessible or destroyed. More creative camerawork like that usually evades Last Breath though. Otherwise, this is a very routine-looking movie. Neither Parkinson’s filmmaking nor Tania Goding’s editing really make it feel like there’s a race against time to save Lemons. There’s excessive breathing space between shots, not to mention a lack of claustrophobia, that erases the tension.
Brief glimpses of Lemons on the ocean floor also fail to find interesting ways to cut between this man’s struggle for survival and his visions of the past. Seemingly routine FaceTime calls with his fiancé now dominate his mind as death hovers over him. It’s no wonder these conversations and pieces of footage are at the forefront of his psyche. Parkinson and Goding’s standard visual impulses, though, fail to lend emotional substance to these dashes between the past and present. Worse still, the one big opening sequence showing Lemons and Morag together is so oddly composed and acted. In their one big interaction, this couple comes off as too artificially perfect to get invested in.
Most of the rest of Last Breath is competently done, including Woody Harrelson in a grizzled supporting turn and a serviceable score from Paul Leonard-Morgan. The production design on the various interiors of the decompression chambers and corners of the ship are also solidly realized. Hooray for clearly using tactile backdrops for these sequences and not just green screen. Parkinson and company also deserve praise for executing scenes set on the darkened seafloor that don’t just devolve into visual incoherency. Lead characters like Lemons and Yuasa remain consistently visible whenever they’re underwater, which is more than many ocean-centric movies can claim. To boot, Parkinson creates a handful of striking images through contrasting the pitch-black surroundings with very contained bursts of color, namely the red light from a trusty flare Lemons clings to.
Still, these benefits are all in the service of a movie that’s just too emotionally inert to get invested in. Last Breath’s compact runtime unfortunately signals how little this movie has to offer. It ends as soon as it begins and doesn’t make the brief journey all that worthwhile. Unlike this weekend’s other narrative movie newcomer based on a documentary, Superboys of Malegaon, Last Breath undoubtedly was better served in its original documentary format. Unless the late great Tony Scott was around to give this story a massive jolt of life, it’s clear Last Breath should’ve stayed in port.