DN:FILM Last Breath

As Chris Lemons was gasping for air, more than 300 feet below monster waves in the freezing North Sea, stuck on his side in a diving suit fit for an astronaut, its umbilical cord to his ship severed, his mind began to reel. He thought about the house he was building with his fiancée, of their grand future together, and all the joy that might slip away. And then his body relaxed and breathing slowed, his fearful thoughts calmed, and he surrendered to the idea of death. And it wasn’t so bad, like slipping into sleep.

Going into the clenching undersea doc LAST BREATH, you know Lemons escapes that watery tomb by a hairbreadth and that those bleak recollections come from his own smiling mouth. Yet it hardly matters in Richard da Costa and Alex Parkinson’s thrilling, chilling rescue-mission drama, which plays like “Apollo 13” set on the drenched, crepuscular moon in “Alien.” A claustrophobe’s grimmest nightmare, Lemons’ predicament—36 minutes without an air supply in the gloomiest depths—snares you in primal despair.

In 2012, Lemons was part of a small diving crew working on deep-sea drilling equipment when a freak storm tossed the mother ship to which they were attached and caused vessel-wide computer failure. When the huge ship was blown about like an unmanned sailboat, Lemons’ tether tangled, then snapped. With a seamless weave of the crew’s video footage and deft reenactments of charged rescue scenes, the doc forges a narrative as hermetic and harrowing as its environs.

This emotional ride is that much more intense because of the filmmakers' success in effectively humanizing the ship’s mates, who alternately stay poised and mildly panic during the ordeal. Some can’t suppress their emotions, reflecting on the miraculous outcome that resulted from what they'd assumed would be a body recovery. Says a medic, choking up: “I couldn’t believe we got away with it.” More startling is the bracing philosophy of one of Lemons' fellow divers. "He wasn’t one of my kids,” he shrugs. “It was a diving job gone wrong. Shit happens.” Somebody should put that on a bumper sticker.