Last Breath (2025)

The film is a taut, salt-crusted procedural about North Sea saturation divers. It dramatizes the 2012 incident in which Chris Lemons survived without oxygen for nearly half an hour. Alex Parkinson remakes his own documentary. Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, and Cliff Curtis spend most of the runtime worrying about umbilical lines, dynamic positioning systems, and emergency air. That is the movie's entire moral universe. The cast reflects the real divers, which yields a modest representational note. Simu Liu as David Yuasa and Cliff Curtis as Captain Jenson are present because those men were present. No casting manifesto is pinned to the wall. The diversity is archival.

On other fronts, the film is a desert. There is no LGBTQ subplot, no feminist argument, no racial thesis. The lone female character is a fiancée in a brief reunion scene. The gas lines are operational hazards, not climate sermons. The ship's crew is a workplace, not a metaphor for late capitalism. Nobody discusses body image, neurodivergence, or the reinterpretation of history. The film treats the documented event as documented. The closest thing to a lecture is a safety briefing, and even that is delivered with urgency instead of ideology. This is not a failure of social consciousness. It is a choice of genre. Survival thrillers have little room for sermons when a man is running out of air.

What remains is craftsmanship. The tension is engineered with dials, weather, and the slow arithmetic of oxygen. The film earns its generally favorable reviews by doing one thing cleanly. It does not pause to explain what we should think about the North Sea gas industry. It does not ask us to applaud its own virtue. In the current landscape, such restraint can feel almost radical. But we should not confuse restraint with a progressive text. Last Breath is a well-made story about divers who want to live and a crew that wants to save them. That is all. It is enough for the film. It is not enough to make it a cultural battleground.