The Last Breath: unfortunate title – but Julian Sands’s final film is otherwise entirely unsurprising

Julian Sands in The Last Breath
Julian Sands in The Last Breath

There are two reasons why The Last Breath is unfortunately titled. This film, in which sharks chomp down on scuba divers in a resolutely low-budget fashion, will forever be confused with Last Breath, which is already, in fact, a pair of films – a 2019 British documentary about a terrifying diving accident, and an identically titled dramatisation of that story with Woody Harrelson, coming out next year.

The other, much more grave misfortune is that this straight-to-VOD effort contains the final appearance of Julian Sands, who died last year while hiking in California. But no racing to update obituaries will be needed, for the role, a stock one, adds little more than crumbs to Sands’s portfolio. He’s in it for about ten scattered minutes as a grizzled diving veteran named Levi, with an accent that reverts, perhaps not quite all the way, to Sands’s birthplace in Yorkshire.

At least his attire is delightful: he’s in a red fisherman’s beanie, with an open-necked shirt and jaunty white neckerchief. Given the infamous tedium of water-based shoots, it’s to Sands’s advantage that he has easily the least gruelling part, as the only character who doesn’t spend 80 per cent of their screen time in full scuba gear underwater, exploring the recesses of a sunken battleship, the USS Charlotte, last seen off the waters of the British Virgin Islands in 1944.

College dropout Noah (Masters of the Air’s Jack Parr) is the one who finds this wreck in the present day, and accepts a hefty fee from his frenemy Brett (Alexander Arnold) to lead the way down there with three other companions.

It takes an awfully long time for the sharks to show up, but the film doesn’t do a bad job tightening claustrophobia and letting the oxygen levels in everyone’s tanks run down before the frenzy starts. It’s a little like Sanctum, the surprisingly profitable 2011 cave-diving thriller, crossed with, say, Deep Blue Sea.

Faint praise, though, is the best that can be mustered. Sure, the idea of sustaining a hideous leg wound that needs underwater treatment is quite novel. And the cast – which include Kim Spearman as a compassionate medic – acquit themselves well in this sequence.

You can be absolutely certain, though, that the other three are chum in the water, particularly Brett, who is an arrogant tech-bro flashing his money around: a red rag to any self-respecting shark, of course. As director, Swedish journeyman Joachim Hedén has made something competent, basic and profoundly unsurprising. If you come in merely desperate to know where Sands got his final paycheque, that’s pretty weird – but here you are.


15 cert, 96 min. On VOD, DVD/Blu-ray from July 5