So, there I was, lazing on the sofa, relatively late on a Saturday night, suddenly with the opportunity to watch a movie.
Out comes the JustWatch app and its ever-growing list of movies I’ve flagged to watch at some point. Now is my chance to tick one off.
Now, I confess, on this occasion, I did something I do a little too often and sorted by runtime. I’m a tired guy, and did I mention it was quite late?
I scroll past the likes of Hallow Road (too harrowing) and Mad God (too mad), and I find myself hovering over Last Breath.
79 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, free on Amazon Prime Video, and a runtime of just over an hour and a half? That sounds ideal.
So, I fire it up on my Apple TV 4K, expecting a fairly tense but also somewhat lightweight drama.
What I’m not expecting is a genuinely superb showcase for my OLED TV (a Sony A95L, for what it’s worth) – but that’s what Last Breath is, even in SDR, which is what Prime Video inexplicably delivers it in.
The movie (I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible here, but if you want to go in completely cold, just trust me and find it in the Prime Video app or buy the Last Breath 4K Blu-ray from Amazon) is a dramatisation of a North Sea accident that saw a deep-sea diver stranded 300 feet below sea level.
It’s fascinating to see how this industry and these divers work.
They live for weeks at a time in pressurised capsules stored in the bowels of a ship. Each day, a diving bell takes them down, deep into the sea, from where they drop to the seabed to perform maintenance on the gas lines that run across the bottom. It’s incredible stuff.
That isn’t what makes it a great showcase for OLED, though. What makes it a great showcase for OLED is the combination of pitch-black surroundings and small areas of piercing light.
When the unfortunate diver gets stranded in the first place, he’s plunged into total darkness. Lost, he lights a red flare. Watch on a properly set-up OLED TV and in a properly pitch-black room, and the bright red light from the flare is literally all you can see.
This perfect contrast is something that only OLED can achieve. The best Mini LED TVs might get close, but they still can’t place a perfectly black pixel next to one that is bright red, and it’s this perfect, blooming-free (and therefore distraction-free) delivery that sells the oppressive drama and puts you in the shoes of a diver abandoned at the bottom of the sea.
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the film overall. The characters are a bit one-dimensional, but the performances (particularly those of Woody Harrelson and Mark Bonnar) are strong enough to sell the extraordinary story.
But it’s the awesome high-contrast section that’s convinced me to order the 4K Blu-ray so that I can a) see it in HDR as intended, and b) use it for putting future OLED and Mini LED TVs through their paces in our dedicated test rooms.
Watch Last Breath on Amazon Prime Video
Order the Last Breath 4K Blu-ray from Amazon
MORE:
Here are the best OLED TVs you can buy right now
And here are the best Mini LED TVs
