Last Breath (2025)

**Rating --- 7/10** I really liked this movie, based on quite an interesting real story. I personally love anything to do with water so a movie about a diving accident falls right into my ball park. Some CCTV parts seem to be from the real deal, which makes it all the better. This gives it an eerie look. I do think it could use a bit less dramatic music, some scenes would be a lot better with different music choices or just pure silence, such as Dave jumping off of the dive bell to go rescue Chris. Overall the movie was fantastic.

Chris (Finn Cole) is a young deep sea diver who is about to get married to Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) but who has one month-long job working maintaining pipelines at the bottom of the North Sea to complete, first. The team is led by his friend, the experienced Duncan (Woody Harrelson) and they are to be joined on the trip by the slightly aloof Dave (Simu Liu) who is wary of the skills of the young man. Anyway, off they set into the teeth of a storm and with 20-foot waves pounding their ship the latter two descend to the bottom and that’s when it all goes a bit off-piste. On the surface, the ship loses stabilising power and that leaves the divers stranded, then Chris gets his ropes entangled and it soon becomes quite a desperate rescue mission with time very much against them. It’s based on true events that in themselves are quite intriguing, and there is some really quite menacing underwater photography (including some real bodysuit imagery) used here, but sadly the acting is all pretty ropey across the board and the writing doesn’t really do much to help out the underused but still over-acting Harrelson. It’s a tautly directed story at times, but somehow it just never really characterises these men engagingly enough nor quite capture just how dangerous their jobs of fixing our crucial energy infrastructure actually are. Perhaps that’s because so much of the activity is either 300 feet under the sea and pitch black, or because the men are in industrial diving suits, - or maybe even both, but in the end the film managed to sterilise much of the sense of jeopardy that the real tale provided and leaves us with a something just a bit lacking.