It’s hard to think of a worse way to die than trapped, without heat, communication, or oxygen, 300 feet beneath the sea. That’s the fate that real-life diver Chris Lemons nearly faced in 2012. And now, his harrowing story is a major Hollywood movie, aka Last Breath, which opened in theaters last week.

Directed by Alex Parkinson, with a script by Mitchell LaFortune, Parkinson, and David Brooks, Last Breath is an action-thriller is a narrative remake/adaptation of Parkinson 2019 documentary of the same name. Finn Cole stars as Chris Lemons, a real-life diver who, in 2012, survived a horrific diving accidents that found him trapped at the bottom of the North Sea. Woody Harrelson and Marvel’s Simu Liu star as fellow divers Duncan Allcock and David Yuasa, Lemons’s colleagues who were determined not to leave him to die. 

Read on to learn more about the Last Breath true story.

Both the 2019 documentary Last Breath and this new feature recount the true story of a 2012 saturation diving accident, when diver Chris Lemons (played in the movie by Finn Cole) gets trapped 330 feet under the sea, with no heat, no light, and a very small amount of oxygen. Spoiler alert: By a miracle, Lemons lived to tell the tale.

You can hear about Lemons’s 2012 diving accident from the man himself, in a recent interview with The Guardian. Basically, on September 18, 2012, Chris Lemons assumed he was going to have a normal day at his job. He worked as a saturation diver, which meant he lived underwater in a specialized submarine.

His work routinely involved being lowered via a “diving bell,” or a chamber used to lower divers, to the seabed floor, to do work on underwater structures. While the divers work, they are attached to the diving bell via an “umbilical” cable, which provides their diving suits with power, light, communication, heat, and oxygen. But on that particular day, something went wrong. The two divers, Lemons and Dave Yuasa (played in the movie by Simu Liu), were instructed to return to the safety of the diving bell immediately, where a third diver, Duncan Allcock (played by Woody Harrelson in the movie) was stationed.

Up above, the ship’s positioning system had failed, causing both the ship and the diving bell to drift off course. The divers could no longer see the bell, but they were still attached to it via the umbilical cables. So they began to pull themselves along the cables. But during this journey, Lemons’s cable got caught on the structure they’d been repairing.

 “I immediately knew it was caught,” Lemons told The Guardian. “You’ve got this 8,000-tonne vessel pulling that umbilical tight. There was nothing I could do to release it.”

The ship continued to tug on Lemons’s cable until it snapped. He lost all communication, power, and his hose of oxygen. He quickly turned the knob on his helmet which provided him an emergency supply of air to breathe—enough for about eight or nine minutes. He was able to stumble back to the structure, the manifold, he’d been working on, where he would wait for a rescue, if there was to be one. But he didn’t have much hope—especially when there was no one to greet him at the structure.

“I realized that even if Dave had been there, the chances of him getting me back to a breathable environment before I ran out of gas were minimal,” Lemons told The Guardian. “With nobody there, I decided this was probably going to be it. In a strange way, that had a calming effect; the fear, the panic drained out of me – there was nothing I could do. I assumed a sort of fetal position and was overtaken by grief. A great sadness took over at that point.”

At this point, Lemons explained, he passed out. Yuasa returned to the structure, assuming he’d be transporting Lemons’s lifeless body back to the ship. It had been 35 minutes since the cable snapped, and Lemons only had about eight minutes of oxygen. After getting Lemons’s body back inside the bell, they took off his helmet and saw he was bright blue. Allcock performed mouth-to-mouth, and then, a miracle: Lemons was revived.

“They’re the real heroes in this story,” Lemons said of his colleagues. “I’m just a damsel in distress.”

It’s a medical mystery as to how Lemons was able to not only survive, but completely recover, with no brain damage. Less than a month later, he was back on the job, diving down into the North Sea in the very same spot. He told The Guardian that rather trauma, he found the experience gave him strength. “We sometimes underestimate what we’re capable of. It’s given me courage and confidence, rather than knocked it out of me.”

Lemons, who is bald now and was bald then, also said he’s tickled by the actor, Finn Cole, who plays him in the Last Breath movie. “Lush head of hair, good-looking lad. Makes complete sense.”

If you want to learn more about the Last Breath true story, you can buy or rent the documentary on Amazon Prime.