Keep Breathing is a somber character portrait and poignant rumination on mental illness

I can’t imagine much worse than being trapped in a situation where I not only have to fight for survival, but I have to be alone with my own thoughts for an extended period of time. Even the period between wake and slumber every night is an exercise in mental torment. Melissa Barrera’s character Liv in survival drama Keep Breathing doesn’t have to imagine, that is her situation as established early into the limited series six-episode run.

We meet Liv at an airport as she desperately tries to board a plane to Inuvik to meet someone before they’re gone. First impressions are not her strong suit as she comes across as someone demanding and rude, her establishing character moment including her berating a staff member at the airport because of circumstances beyond her control (weather grounds Liv’s plane).

That exasperation Liv feels shows the scope of her desperation, something we see internalized throughout the season, especially as she reckons with her past.

Keep Breathing Netflix review

Seeing as Liv cannot get on the plane she intercepts a duo after hearing them refer to Inuvik and persuades them into letting her on their plane. As you might expect, things quickly go downhill from there. The plane crashes, killing the pilot and, not long after, the co-pilot (Austin Stowell) also succumbs to his injuries, leaving Liv a lone survivor in the vast expanse of Canadian wilderness.

Here’s where the show shifts and starts to establish its tone. I’ve seen quite a few survival thrillers, films like 127 Hours and The Shallows, the more recent Showtime series Yellowjackets, but Keep Breathing is not a “thriller.” It’s actually a somber and moving rumination on mental illness, depression and how we carry childhood trauma.

Keep Breathing is a very intimate character portrait that spends its time digging into Liv and her past. What happens when you’re weighted down with sadness and suddenly forced to fight for your survival? Do you give up and let nature take its course? Or do you fight tooth and nail to make it out alive? Those are the questions Liv grapples with as her situation goes from bad to worse.

The story moves back and forth between the past and present as Liv tries to remain resourceful and find food, shelter, water and other necessary tools for survival and then flashbacks show us how she got to this point. What catalyst in her life pushed her to her board that plane to Inuvik with two complete strangers?

We see that, in the past, Liv had a difficult upbringing as her mother struggled with her own personal demons and left Liv at a very young age. More recently, Liv had to deal with her father’s ailing health and an on-again, off-again romantic fling at work with her co-worker, Danny (Jeff Wilbusch).

There are so many moments where you can feel Liv’s inner child crying out for stability and it makes you want to hug her. Those formidable feelings from her past have been repressed, shaping Liv into the prickly workaholic that keeps everyone at arm’s length as an adult. Now a high-powered attorney, Liv is constantly at the office, but you can’t run from what’s inside you.

Crashing in the wilderness brings all of those feelings to the surface because in the forest, there’s nothing to keep those emotions at bay. In many ways the landscape is a vast echo chamber reflecting her most innate fears. The wild chips away at the walls Liv has constructed around herself to survive.

She’s thrust into this situation where she has no one but herself to count on, and that’s reflected by her surroundings, the unyielding loneliness punctuated by hallucinations and visions, such as the return of Stowell giving voice to that nasty inner doubt.

The message I resonated with the most were the show’s little interior moments, this baseline of “just keep breathing.” It sounds so simple, but when you are deep in it, in that pain and smothering darkness—that’s all you can do, and that’s okay. That’s enough. It’s enough to put one foot in front of the other when every cell of your body pleading with you to let go and give up. That’s the kind of inner strength Liv has to find while she’s stranded and I think Barrera does a great job playing those profoundly quiet beats.

Keep Breathing could easily have been a movie, but I think the episodic format worked in its slow breakdown of Liv’s past. As a movie, the sequences in the past might have felt bloated, whereas the show allows for chapter-by-chapter explorations with thematic elements that resonate in the present as well as the past.

I don’t know that this show will work for everyone, but I found it to be a surprising portrait of grief and the way depression can really sneak up on you in the most unexpected ways. I’ve struggled with my mental health my entire life and so there were many moments in Keep Breathing that left me a little breathless—fitting, I think.

Barrera carries this show on her adept shoulders, and it was fantastic to see the show helmed by two female directors, Maggie Kiley and Rebecca Rodriguez. I loved the thoughtful use of lighting and color in the past to contrast with the lush greenery of the wilderness and the mixture of cool and warm tones to create a visual mood spectrum.

In short, Keep Breathing is a solemn, yet earnest character study carried through by a strong central performance and I found something innately compelling about this sort of poetic melancholy and using the “lost in wilderness” theme as a metaphor for channeling and working through internal conflict. Have we seen it done before? Sure, but that doesn’t make this specific portrait of a young woman any less poignant or cathartic to watch.

Keep Breathing premieres this Thursday, July 28, on Netflix.