2025’s Last Breath, directed by Alex Parkinson and starring Woody Harrelson, Finn Cole, and Simu Liu, tells the harrowing story of Chris Lemons, a diver who falls to the bottom of the North Sea while fixing a gas line. As Chris runs out of oxygen, it’s a race against time to save his life. Last Breath is not only a tense film, but it’s also one based on what really happened to the actual Chris Lemons, as shown in the 2019 documentary also titled Last Breath. Hollywood loves making movies based on real-life disasters, but the crew behind the film resisted the urge to make an exaggerated film filled with CGI to tell a more melodramatic story. Instead, Last Breath‘s story stays simple and immediate by making nearly everything the audience sees so very real.
What Is ‘Last Breath’ About?
What happened to Chris Lemons is an intriguing story, not because it’s over-the-top, but because of how impossible the odds were. The stakes are high with a young man, who has a wife at home, doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, by making it his career to fix oil lines at the bottom of the sea. When he is dragged to the depths and left without oxygen, he should be dead, but somehow he lives for tens of minutes without taking a breath thanks to the actions of his heroic co-workers, David Yuasa (Liu) and Duncan Allcock (Harrelson).
If this movie had come out in the 90s, or even a few years ago, it would have become a stereotypical Hollywood film that took a real-life story and expanded it to make it even more dramatic. The wife, who never knew Chris was in trouble, would have been told early on so we could see her crying by the phone, waiting to hear that her husband had been saved. Down at the bottom of the sea, Chris would have floated away, or worse, man-eating CGI sharks would appear to up the ante. Last Breath does none of this.
‘Last Breath’s Actors Were Trained To Become Divers
If you’ve seen the Last Breath documentary, some moments from the feature film feel like they were lifted straight from it, as if the exact shot had been reused. This is because Alex Parkinson and company aimed for a film that felt as true as possible. To accomplish this, everything you see with the divers underwater is real. In an interview with Yahoo, cinematographer Ian Seabrook stated, “None of it was faked.”
With so much of the action taking place underwater, initially there was an idea to have real divers stand in for the actors, and then use CGI to add in the actors’ faces later. Instead, the actors underwent extensive training, which Seabrook said was unusual—it also made things very complicated and dangerous. Not only did the actors have to give a performance, but they had to think about their physical safety at the same time. They would be underwater for six hours a day filming, done in short spurts, and in big, claustrophobic helmets.
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Real divers were put underwater with them to keep them safe, but their scenes were filmed at night, making things even more unsafe and terrifying. Seabrook, who was there with the actors the entire time holding a camera rig, added, “Once you put the mask on, you don’t have peripheral vision. As an actor, if you’ve never put a dive helmet on and you realize you can’t get out of all this equipment quickly, you’ve got to have pretty good nerves.”
The Realness of the Action Makes ‘Last Breath’ More Intense
That dedication to making Last Breath as real as possible shows in the final product. It’s not just that the filmmakers stopped themselves from creating more stakes or widening the scope; it’s also how raw the underwater scenes are. It’s nothing more than a camera filming divers, really played by Simu Liu and Finn Cole, in a terrifying situation. There is the heaviness of the minutes going by and the darkness of the cold water closing in like death, and that’s it.
By refusing to take the easy way out and use CGI, Last Breath is kept viscerally realistic, thus restricting what could logistically be done down to the basics. There were no added distractions for the viewer, and only the immediacy of the plot mattered. It’s a simple strategy more movies could learn from, whether their plots are based on a true story or the idea of a writer. Don’t do everything you can just because technology makes it possible—audiences don’t need a magic trick, just a well-told story. Last Breath is a story about life and death at the bottom of the world, but it only needed 93 minutes and a few brave, well-trained actors to put audiences on the edge of their seats.
Last Breath
- Release Date
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February 27, 2025
- Runtime
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93 minutes
- Director
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Alex Parkinson
- Writers
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Alex Parkinson, David Brooks, Mitchell LaFortune
- Producers
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Jared Underwood, Alastair Burlingham, Danny Mandel, Jeremy Plager, Anna Mohr-Pietsch, Gary Raskin, Stewart Le Marechal, Richard Da Costa, Andrew C. Robinson, Jonny Persey, David Brooks, Al Morrow, Dan Clifton, Hal Sadoff, Paul Brooks, Norman Golightly
Cast
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Woody Harrelson
Duncan Allcock
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