In Review: 'Last Breath,' 'My Dead Friend Zoe'

Last Breath
Dir. Alex Parkinson
93 min.

In 2012, Chris Lemons cheated death. A Scottish saturation diver working to maintain oil pipelines at the bottom of the North Sea, Lemons was separated from his two teammates when severe weather and a mechanical failure combined to cause a freak accident. This left him alone, in the dark, with only a few minutes of breathable oxygen. He remained in that state for over 30 minutes and yet somehow lived to tell the tale. In 2019, directors Richard da Costa and Alex Parkinson turned that tale into a documentary entitled Last Breath. With this new film, Parkinson takes a stab at telling it again, this time as a narrative feature.

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It’s an extraordinary story that here gets a solid, decidedly ordinary retelling. Finn Cole stars as Lemons, a nice fellow whose work drew him away from his fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) for long stretches even before taking this latest assignment. This will require him to spend days in a compression tank to allow his body to adjust to the intense pressure of the ocean floor. Chris won’t be alone. He’s joined by the genial veteran Duncan (Woody Harrelson), who’s being put out to pasture after this last job, and David (Simu Liu), a no-nonsense professional with a demeanor about as warm, well, the depths of the North Sea.

Parkinson efficiently lays out the mechanics of saturation diving but Last Breath has difficulty overcoming the difficulties of dramatizing an accident and rescue effort that takes place in the watery depths. A few shots suggest the vastness of the space and the extremity of the conditions, but the film too often leans into swelling music and reaction shots to pump up the drama. (The thinly drawn characters, however well played, don’t help.) It’s never bad, but also never particularly gripping, especially considering the high stakes and extraordinary odds everyone involved had to overcome to emerge with any story to tell, much less one with a happy ending. —Keith Phipps

Last Breath drops into theaters tonight.

My Dead Friend Zoe
Dir. Kyle Hausmann-Stokes
98 min.

The one nagging problem with My Dead Friend Zoe—and it’s a major one, as you’ll see after this em dash—is the protagonist’s dead friend, Zoe. Conceived as a seriocomic companion to an Afghanistan war veteran struggling with her mental health, Zoe is played by Natalie Morales, the hugely appealing and funny star of late, great AMC Family series The Middleman and an actress with a Judy Greer-esque talent for acing whatever film or TV supporting role is offered to her. The failures of My Dead Friend Zoe are not on Morales, who acquits herself well as the eye-rolling cynic that nags at her living friend’s conscience, but on co-writer/director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, who’s putting a twist on a modern PTSD drama that’s much more affecting without any spin on the ball. 

For Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), an Army vet still struggling a few years after her tour in Afghanistan, Zoe doubles as her only reliable partner and the most imposing obstacle to getting better. She has been assigned mandatory group therapy under a sympathetic but demanding doctor (Morgan Freeman), but she’s reluctant to participate, in part because Zoe keeps telling her, “Aren’t we better than this ‘woe is me’ shit?” In the middle of this crisis, Merit gets news from her mother (Gloria Reuben), who’s traveling abroad, that her grandfather Dale (Ed Harris), another Army veteran, was found wandering off by the highway. The doctor diagnoses Dale with early-onset Alzheimer’s, leaving Merit with the unsavory job of moving her irritable grandpa out of his lake house and into a nearby retirement community. 

It shouldn’t take much for a cast this loaded to make a meaningful drama about PTSD, and there are flashes of the film that might have been in the simple, one-on-one interactions between Martin-Green and the characters played by Freeman and Harris, both of whom are war veterans who could feasibly help her. Yet Hausmann-Stokes plays irritatingly coy with the circumstances surrounding Zoe’s death, doling out flashbacks that often inch to the line of giving us the truth before pulling away like a truncated nightmare. The cost of keeping this secret for most of My Dead Friend Zoe is that a true reckoning becomes impossible, because the twist can’t be confronted until the end. That leaves too big a hole in the imaginary banter between Merit and her friend Zoe, and only a smattering of scenes where Merit is meaningfully exposed. Trying to let Zoe go is not just a positive step forward for Merit—it would have been for the movie, too. — Scott Tobias   

My Dead Friend Zoe opens in limited release this weekend.