Last Breath (2025) Dir: Alex Parkinson
- Ridley Coote
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
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This deep-sea survival thriller, directed by Alex Parkinson, is a feature film retelling of the events in a 2019 documentary of the same name. It details the harrowing events of a deep sea diving mission that went very wrong, and the fascinating truth behind the film was what attracted my attention to it the most. Reviews were, generally speaking, fairly good, but not exactly mind-blowing, so my expectations were kept to a moderate degree.
From an audio perspective, I found this film extremely generic. The foley was fine, it was mainly the soundtrack which underwhelmed me. It felt like a composition I had heard in a thousand other films, which didn't exactly help this film stand out from the crowd of survival films based on true events. I will say, however, that some of the cinematography looked very good. Admittedly, I am easy to impress when it comes to deep sea films, in that regard, but seeing the divers interact with such a unique environment still looked interesting.
The story being taken from real life both helped and hindered this film. On the one hand, it made the desperate rescue attempts all the more impressive, but on the other, it made the film feel incredibly predictable. Furthermore, the way some of the scenes on the ship on the surface were shot, as well as those on the land, were very cheesy, even a little cringey. With that said, the bare bones of the story were well done - it was emotional, it was fairly tense, and it was, at times, gripping.
Woody Harrelson gave the best performance he possibly could for a man essentially stuck in one very small location for virtually the entire film. I really enjoy him as an actor, most of the time, and I thought he gave the script a performance way better than it perhaps deserved. Simu Liu had some good moments, but was definitely overshadowed by Harrelson, whilst Finn Cole didn't feature for a large portion of the film, albeit the times he did, he was fairly good. I'll also give a quick mention to Cliff Curtis for what was a respectable supporting performance.
Overall, I found this to be a fairly generic, but lightly interesting survival thriller, albeit I can't imagine that it revealed much more than the documentary did. It did encourage me to watch that documentary though, which I suppose is a positive. I saw someone on Letterboxd call this "Dad Cinema" and that's exactly what it is. The truth of the film is what makes it so interesting, but I couldn't help but feel like it was struggling to fill the time, at points.
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