Last Breath Director on the Stranger-Than-Fiction True Story Behind the Deep-Sea Diving Thriller
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Last Breath.
If you’re someone who loves a good old-fashioned tale of survival against all odds, then Last Breath, now in theaters, is likely right up your alley.
Directed and co-written by Alex Parkinson, Last Breath dramatizes the true story of a saturation-diving accident that took place off the coast of Scotland in 2012, and is based on Parkinson and Richard da Costa’s 2019 documentary of the same name. The rescue thriller revolves around the near-death experience of Chris Lemons (played in the movie by Finn Cole), a young commercial diver who was lost at the bottom of the North Sea for nearly 40 minutes with only a little over five minutes of breathable gas in his emergency tank and no way to protect himself from the freezing underwater temperatures.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“I really love stories where the truth is stranger than fiction because it gives you amazing insight into the human psyche,” Parkinson tells TIME. “Chris should have died that night. But his story is a great example of how the human spirit can overcome anything.”
The film sets the scene of the death-defying incident with an introduction into the world of saturation diving, one of the world’s most dangerous and isolating professions. We meet Chris, who says goodbye to his fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) to report for duty at the support vessel that will transport him and his fellow divers—most notably, seasoned veteran Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) and no-nonsense heavyweight Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu)—to the North Sea locale where they’ll be performing repairs on a gas manifold over 300 feet below the surface.
Like in the movie, the real-life job involves spending weeks living onboard a ship inside a pressurized, tin can-like chamber that allows divers’ bodies to acclimate to the extreme conditions they’ll be subjected to in the process of repairing oil rigs and gas pipelines at the bottom of the ocean. The team of three divers scheduled for a shift then descends into the water in a diving bell that’s attached to the support vessel before two divers drop to the seabed while the third remains inside the bell to help ensure their safety. The submerged divers are tethered to the bell by “umbilical” cords that provide essential life support functions like breathing gas, communication, power, and heated water that let them spend long hours in the depths.
“I’d never heard of saturation diving before and never knew people were living for months at a time in these tiny capsules and working on the bottom of the sea like that. That’s an incredible backdrop,” Parkinson says of first learning about what happened to Lemons. “Then, on top of that, there’s the accident and this incredible story of heroism.”
On the day of Lemons’ accident, he and Yuasa had begun their work on the manifold, with Allcock assisting them from the bell, when their support vessel suffered a sudden dynamic positioning system failure. The outage occurred during a violent storm on the surface, which caused the ship to rapidly drift in the swells and drag the bell with it. Although Lemons and Yuasa moved quickly to try to get back to the bell, Lemons’ umbilical snagged on the manifold and eventually snapped, leaving him stranded in the freezing underwater dark with minimal oxygen.
According to Parkinson, the improbability of Lemons’ survival and extreme nature of saturation diving is what originally drew him to the story. But it was the relatability of the whirlwind of emotions Lemons experienced in the moments before he lost consciousness that Parkinson felt brought true heart to the narrative. “I’m never going to find myself at 300 feet underwater,” he says. “But when Chris was in that situation in the pitch black with the umbilical broken and his gas rapidly running out, I could immediately identify what he was going through and know what he was feeling.”
While Lemons miraculously managed to find his way back to the manifold, climb on top of it, and clip himself to the structure, he soon fell unconscious as his emergency gas supply ran out. What followed was a series of near-miss successes that allowed the crew of the support vessel to guide the ship back into position and Yuasa to dive down and rescue Lemons. Although the crew was convinced they would be retrieving a dead body by that point, Lemons came to in the diving bell after just a few assisted breaths from Allcock. He subsequently returned to work just three weeks later to finish the job.
“Incredible things can happen when you don’t give up,” Parkinson says. “In that huge storm, [the crew] could have said, well, it’s too dangerous for us to try and get the ship back when we don’t have control, we’ll have to wait until much later and go and pick up the body. But the fact that they carried on is inspirational.”
To this day, there is no concrete explanation for how Lemons was able to survive for that long without oxygen and suffer no lasting physical or mental effects. But the most popular theory chalks it up to a unique combination of depth and temperature somehow creating an environment that allowed Lemons’ body, which was saturated with oxygen from the special gas the divers breathe, to sustain itself.
“You could say that Chris was the unluckiest person in the world for the accident to happen in the first place,” Parkinson says. “But conversely to that, he was the luckiest person in the world that all the right people were in the right place to do the right thing at the right time in the exact right sequence to get him rescued and resuscitated. If any one of those things had been different, he would not have survived. That’s mind blowing.”