It is an odd time to be launching a survival drama such as Netflix’s new six-part miniseries Keep Breathing. After all, there is not much you could do to a lone survivor of a plane crash that would not feel restful compared to coping with normal life in 2022.
Certainly, the premise of Keep Breathing is undermined from the start by the fact that the Canadian wilderness into which Liv (Melissa Barrera) – a tough, young lawyer – crash-lands looks idyllic. Sure, you would rather be there with a little more food and firestarters than the two power bars and soggy lighter that is Liv’s lot by the time she has swum ashore. The extroverts among you may like more company than a dying co-pilot, too. But overall it looks like a win. Even when a bear turns up and eats the bars, I shrugged and thought: if it is a choice between that or monkeypox and Liz Truss for PM – well, hello, my ursine friend.
Even without being hamstrung by context, there is not much to detain you here. Keep Breathing is determinedly basic stuff. There is no question that Liv will escape the downed plane (she hitched a ride with two guys on a light aircraft after her commercial flight was cancelled). There is no question that the surviving pilot will die just after uttering the news that no one knew their flight plan and so no one is coming to rescue them. And there is no question that this will be confirmed when she rescues their kitbags from the submerged plane and finds them full of money and tubs of opiates. They were drug-smuggling across the border in their rickety private plane! Who knew? Everyone except Liv.
Any tension there is in Liv’s remarkably non-urgent fight for survival – it takes her until day three to start looking for food, despite the bear eating her power bars early doors – is further dissipated by flashbacks. These appear whenever Liv is ticking off another survivalist drama trope – making a tourniquet, making a raft, waving a signalless phone in the air, screaming into an abyss – or when she is panting against a log, recovering from one of these endeavours going wrong.
It is an interesting tactic in a robinsonade, to swerve away from all the times the protagonist might be working out how to stay alive. It is the genre that best proves the director George Roy Hill’s dictum that “audiences love how-to”. Instead, we get hazy shots of parties full of twentysomething lawyers, which we have seen more often than we have seen someone skinning a rabbit with a stiletto heel, or electrocuting a lake full of fish with an iPhone battery, or whatever else Liv could be doing.
These flashbacks fill us in on what appears to be a terrifically simple backstory, which builds without suspense or making much sense of what little we have learned of Liv before her boring adventure began. She was on the last leg of a journey from New York to Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, presumably to reunite with the writer of the beribboned bundle of letters in her hand luggage.
Why the need to flee? The glimpses of her past reveal a romance with a colleague (Danny, played by Jeff Wilbusch) that presumably went wrong – there is an almost-genuine twist at the end of the first episode that suggests how – and caused her to leave the city, her job and an important case.
She also got drunk and nearly died in an accidental fire after her father died, although whether this is meant to suggest she is an alcoholic is unclear. Also, there was an earth-mother figure in her childhood – possibly her mother – who is probably the person she is running to in Inuvik, if only she could make some trainers out of bark and bear spoor and work out how not to starve to death.
I suspect we are meant to marvel at the doughty resourcefulness that lives in Liv, beneath the glamorous lawyer attire and, er, witty banter (it is agony) that comprise her life before, and ponder the primitive that lives within us all.
There is a sense of punches being pulled all along, probably because of budget restrictions (the plane crash is mostly suggestive blackouts and sounds of splashing). Rather than perch on the edge of your seat, you are more likely to drift off gently to sleep, perhaps dreaming of a pleasant holiday in a log cabin, and wake up when it is all over.
