On September 18, 2012, the dive support vessel, the Norwegian-flagged Bibby Topaz, later known as the Rever Topaz in 2019 and Boka Topaz in 2021, which Volstad Maritime currently owns and is still sailing, suffered a technological disruption that endangered the lives of three saturation divers, Duncan Allcock, David Yuasa and Chris Lemons, as they were on the bottom of the freezing North Sea. After the incident, a Diving Safety Workgroup was formed, and Bibby Offshore Ltd., which was restructured in 2021, the primary operator of the dive support vessel through a long term charter agreement since 2008 through at least 2019 and possibly as late as last year, commissioned a technical safety film, “Lifeline,” which “Last Breath” (2019) expanded and adapted. In turn, the 2019 documentary inspired the 2025 feature film starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu.
Consisting of real footage, including home and surveillance videos, black box audio, photograph montages, interviews and recreations, the suspenseful documentary provides context and answers the question whether Chris will survive the severing of his only source of oxygen and heat. “Last Breath” is riveting because it gives viewers more of a sense of what the people were like, warts and all, and reveals their innermost feelings. No one feels like an archetype that you have seen before in a survival drama. They are normal people in an extreme, unusual workplace, but they just treat it like another day in the office. A home video of Chris offers audiences a tour of the boat and reflects his personality, so the accident does not define him. Duncan shares his motivation for choosing such a dangerous profession. Chris’ fiancé, Morag Martin, is not framed as the frail and pale widow yearning for her husband while looking out the window, but as a hardy woman using heavy equipment who did not make a fuss until she found out about the disaster. Craig Frederick, the hierarchal focused dive supervisor, centers himself as if he is more essential than the captain, which is contrary to the fatherly figure presented in the movie. David presents himself as an unsentimental, barebones man doing a job, but also in a harsher light as someone who would treat a body as if he was transporting a sack of potatoes. Unexpectedly he has a dry sense of humor and came up with Duncan’s nickname, “sat daddy.”
More of the crew get to share the spotlight: nameless or omitted characters who played a pivotal role. Michael Cichorski, the dynamic positioning officer, is the only member of the crew who sounds as if he is not originally from the United Kingdom—possibly from Poland. He offers an accurate perspective on the way that the Topaz was fixed so they could rescue the diving team., and it somehow sounds harder than the dramatized depiction. In the movie, David doubles as a medic, but apparently there was a medic, Stuart Anderson, assigned to work with them after disaster struck. Because the footage is real, animals are occasionally visible, which makes sense since living beings are supposed to live in the water. In retrospect, the feature is completely human centric and artificial.
“Last Breath” is structured in a clever way for the first hour. Many of the interviewees use the past tense so there is no definitive answer whether Chris died. At the hour mark, the truth is revealed, and it is so elemental, simple and dramatic with none of the dramatics of the movie, which proves that you do not need big names or special effects to create a riveting movie. The interview excerpts emphasize how no one had experienced so many system failures on a ship. The actual equipment is more modest than its cinematic counterpart. Do not expect any definitive answers about why the Topaz went on the fritz, but human error did not play a factor according to investigations. The movie omits the fact that breathing heliox, a mixture of oxygen and helium that the divers breathe, makes them sound as if they are kids sucking balloons at a birthday party, which is fair because it would have undercut the gravity of the drama.
Co-directors Richard da Costa, who may have directed the short, and Alex Parkinson, who also wrote the documentary and wrote and directed the feature film, do an excellent job of breaking down a lot of technical information into digestible content with the periodic title cards offering explanations. The feature uses a similar technique, but in a documentary, it is crucial, especially without a narrator, because the only dialogue is organic, not thinly disguised prose dumps. Sound, which conveyed that things were out of the ordinary, is more crucial in the documentary because the soundtrack is not as intrusive so viewers can experience the first-hand impact of certain sounds and disruptions that the crew experienced. Also, a dramatization cannot be dark otherwise no one can watch it so hearing first-hand accounts of the darkness of the bottom of the ocean hammers home the harrowing nature of this job.
The ROV, a camera that was attached to the ship and could plunge the dark depths with a light, plays a different function in the documentary than the movie. In the movie, it is a tool that could be used to physically rescue Chris like a nightmare arcade’s crane or claw machine, but in the earlier movie, it is not only a tool to find Chris, but it is a symbol of hope to communicate to Chris that he is not alone or forgotten, which is more elegant and poignant. It is somehow a more powerful and optimistic moment in the 2019 scene than an accidental snuff film watching a man in death throes. The need for connection goes both ways—they need to believe there is hope as much as the divers did.
The 2025 film briefly reflects on the awareness of impending death, which the 2019 film breaks down in practical and existential terms. Death may be the only thing more mysterious than life underwater, so this meditative reflection is germane. It makes a sensational event into a relatable, universal phenomenon of facing mortality. Instead of the story being a horror movie, it ends up being a reassuring film about not fearing the end and not really being alone if people are there and willing to fight for you.
Instead of choosing between the movie and the documentary, watch both, but unlike the movie, the documentary is suitable for all audiences apart from one curse word, provides more details and is an unvarnished account of real people. It is also amazing that no matter how many ways that the story gets told, it never gets old. Still the movies’ origin feel reminiscent of the fictional Romanian film, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (2023), and makes one wonder if the human interest story is the best kind of capitalist propaganda ever since it is virtually indiscernible. Amazingly there appears to be no litigation connected to the accident, and corporate lawyers may want to fall down the rabbit hole to find out why a company that sells natural gas needed to be restructured for having too much debt, but the movie is not about cold, practical business. Nothing to see here. Look at the triumph of the human spirit.
