**_A great story powerfully told_** > _The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us; soundings cannot reach them. What fanes in those remote depths, what beings live twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters, what is the organisation of the animals we can scarcely conjecture?_ - Jules Verne; _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ (1870) Aside from space, there can be no working environment as potentially dangerous, perilously exacting, and psychologically isolating as the ocean floor. Colloquially known as "doing sat", saturation diving is a technique to reduce decompression sickness amongst divers who work at great depths for long periods. Living in either an onboard pressurised capsule or a self-sustaining pressurised underwater habitat, divers breathe a helium-oxygen mix that prevents nitrogen narcosis, transferring to and from the work site via a pressurised diving bell. Written by Alex Parkinson, and directed by Parkinson and Richard Da Costa, _Last Breath_ is the latest in the man vs. nature subgenre of documentary filmmaking. Using a mixture of talking head interviews, black box footage, camcorder material, and excellently mounted reconstructions, the film plays like an underwater survival thriller. And although the directors' insistence on building to a predictable and overly manipulated pseudo-twist undermines the seriousness of the mate…

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