‘Last Breath’ is a tense underwater drama, based on a true story, of a deep-sea diver who is stranded sans oxygen on the bottom of the sea bed during a drilling exercise, involving the maintenance of telecommunication pipes, and survives against the odds. Hollywood has given us plenty of disaster movies since the run up to the millennium, including ‘2012’, also featuring Woody Harrelson who, in ‘Last Breath’, is a veteran diver on his final mission, and who is determined not to let it end in failure.

It is a much smaller scale venture, though, than the likes of ‘2012’, ‘Armageddon’ or ‘Waterworld’ in that the scene is the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeenshire, with a smaller set of characters or subplots to those bigger budget efforts. Here, in contrast, we are privy to the divers and the dive supervisors involved in the expedition, while the only outside counterpoint is the fiancé of the main character, Chris (Finn Cole), who has a bad feeling that he is spending so much time away in a precarious environment, and her worst fears are then realized.

Much of the film consists of watching Chris on the seabed with the oxygen gradually disappearing, until he spends over half an hour without his supply, and it is this measured pacing which ensures that we are privy to a gripping, visceral experience, though it is a very pared down and minimalist one compared to the classics of the genre. We are privy to an exercise in teamsmanship and solidarity and the way the different personalities of the divers are suspended when life and death stakes are involved. They might as well be in outer space in terms of the way they go weeks without any contact and after each dive they have to spend three days in a decompression chamber.

It is acknowledged in one scene that within a decade it is quite probable that their work as divers will be accomplished by AI instead, so that they are a dying breed, taking risks with their mortality on assignments that will most likely no longer require a human sacrifice. There is a documentary feel to this film which never loses sight of the human story at its heart even if for much of the time the characters are suspended in darkness, in diving gear so heavy that we cannot discern their faces. The ending is quite a saccharine one, and we get to see footage of the real characters on whom this film is based in the coda.