Last Breath

A great story powerfully told

The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us; soundings cannot reach them. What fanes in those remote depths, what beings live twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters, what is the organisation of the animals we can scarcely conjecture?

• Jules Verne; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Aside from space, there can be no working environment as potentially dangerous, perilously exacting, and psychologically isolating as the ocean floor. Colloquially known as "doing sat", saturation diving is a technique to reduce decompression sickness amongst divers who work at great depths for long periods. Living in either an onboard pressurised capsule or a self-sustaining pressurised underwater habitat, divers breathe a helium-oxygen mix that prevents nitrogen narcosis, transferring to and from the work site via a pressurised diving bell. Written by Alex Parkinson, and directed by Parkinson and Richard Da Costa, Last Breath is the latest in the man vs. nature subgenre of documentary filmmaking. Using a mixture of talking head interviews, black box footage, camcorder material, and excellently mounted reconstructions, the film plays like an underwater survival thriller. And although the directors' insistence on building to a predictable and overly manipulated pseudo-twist undermines the seriousness of the material somewhat, with the story needing no such embellishment, this is still a superbly realised film; tense and fascinating, informatively dealing with a subject about which the vast majority of people will know next-to-nothing.

September 18, 2012; the commercial engineering ship Bibby Topaz is 115 miles off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea, assigned with testing the safety of a drilling manifold in the Huntington Oil Field. Descending in the diving bell are the relatively inexperienced Chris Lemons, the stoic David Yuasa (so much so, his nickname is "Vulcan"), and Lemons's men...