Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu star in a terrifyingly well-constructed adaptation of a documentary about a nightmarish accident

It does not take much to convince that, as an opening title card for Last Breath states, the job of a saturation diver is one of the most dangerous on earth. The facts, also summarily listed in the survival thriller’s introduction, speak for themselves: thousands of miles of pipeline traverse the ocean, dependent on human divers to maintain them; said divers spend days in pressurized chambers to reach depths of more than 1,000ft (300 meters), in near-freezing darkness. It may as well be outer space, as the fiancee of one diver bluntly but correctly puts it.

Thankfully, Last Breath, Alex Parkinson’s feature film adaptation of his 2019 documentary of the same name, lets the divers’ work – a maze of levers, pulleys, gas valves, imposing machines and the human capacity to detach from...