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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Keep Breathing’ On Netflix, About A Woman Surviving A Plane Crash While Dealing With Her Past

Where to stream:.

• Keep Breathing
• Melissa Barrera

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Melissa Barrera’s profile has been on the rise for the past few years, ever since she was cast as one of the leads on the Starz series  Vida . Since that show debuted in 2018, she has been in the  Scream franchise and the film version of  In The Heights . In all of those projects, it was hard to take our eyes off her when she was on screen. In her latest project, Barrera will basically be on screen most of the time, and much of the time she’ll be by herself. Can she handle such a daunting acting assignment?

KEEP BREATHING : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a small airport in Canada, we see the departures board flash the destination of Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories.

The Gist: Olivia Rivera (Melissa Barrera), a hotshot young lawyer from New York, is in this airport waiting for her plane to Inuvik, which is delayed. Liv tells the clerk that she needs to get to the tiny town that day, because the person she is meeting there doesn’t know she’s coming. In desperation, she hitches a ride with Sam (Austin Stowell), who says he’s a National Geographic photographer, and his pilot.

Before and during the flight, she thinks about her mother (Florencia Lozano) and how she started her relationship with Danny (Jeff Wilbusch), an associate at her firm that came after a merger. But she’s jolted awake when the plane starts going down, eventually crashing into a lake in the Canadian wilderness. The pilot dies in his seat, but Liv somehow manages to get out and drag Sam, who doesn’t swim, to shore. But he’s losing blood fast, due to a big piece of shrapnel in his leg. Liv takes both their phones and looks to see if she can get service and call for help.

The next morning, she finds out from a dying Sam that no one will find them, since he’s not a photographer and the flight plan was never filed (i.e. they were doing something less than legal). In other words, Liv is on her own, in the middle of nowhere, and no one knows where she is.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The closest comparison we can make is the Tom Hanks film  Cast Away , though we doubt that Barrera’s character will befriend a volleyball and call it Wilson.

Our Take: Because  Keep Breathing is more or less a one-person limited series, its success is going to rely heavily on its star. Yes, Liv will be thinking about her life and why she so desperately needed to go to Inuvik, and that will involve other characters. But the survival scenes will be all on Barrera’s shoulders. And producers Brendan Gall, Martin Gero and Maggie Kiley couldn’t have found a better person to carry a show like this.

Some viewers may know Barrera from the film adaptation of  In The Heights  or the latest in the  Scream franchise, but we know here best from the Starz series Vida , and we were impressed at how dynamic a presence she was there. She displays the same skills in this series; while Liv is decidedly tougher and more closed off than her  Vida character Lyn, both characters are survivors in their own way, determined to live the way they feel they should.

Barerra is taking on a monumental task here, having to essentially act the majority of the scenes by herself, with only the elements and inanimate objects to play against. And we already see in the first episode that she’s more than capable of doing that. Despite the idea that Liv is some citified lawyer who might not be able to adapt, Barrera sells the idea that she can absolutely survive, making her resourcefulness in the situation almost plausible.

Now we just need to see where the plot goes, which will play out in those flashbacks. Why is she on this trip? How does Danny fit in the picture? Why are her parents on her mind all the time? And just what was Sam doing if he’s not a nature photographer?

One of the things we like about the six-episode limited series is that the episodes are all around 30 minutes, so you’re not seeing Liv wandering around the wilderness for hours on end. We’ll get to see her fight for survival and hopefully get our questions answered in just under 3 and a half hours, and for someone who’s burned out on dramas that clock in at an hour or more per episode (we’re still slogging our way through Stranger Things 4 , for instance), the brevity of each episode is refreshing.

Sex and Skin: Liv and Danny are shown making love in a flashback, but not much skin is shown.

Parting Shot: Liv fishes a photo out of the water, which floated up from the plane. It’s an ultrasound of a baby. Is/was it hers?

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the gorgeous scenes of the wilderness in British Columbia, where the show was shot.

Most Pilot-y Line: Sam calls his pilot George (Mike Dopud) “pilot ordinaire”, which was funny but felt like it was a little too clever for the show that we were watching.

Will you stream or skip the Melissa Barrera wilderness drama #KeepBreathing on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) July 30, 2022

Our Call: STREAM IT. Melissa Barrera’s performance will hook the viewers of Keep Breathing,  but the show is also helped by the episodes’ brevity and tight plotting.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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Keep Breathing review – a survival drama so dull it’ll send you off to sleep

Would being the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness be deeply soporific? It seems so. Not even the bears add tension in this basic Netflix ‘thriller’

I t 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.

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Netflix’s ‘Keep Breathing’ Forces Melissa Barrera to Confront the Wild, and Past Pain: TV Review

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

Chief TV Critic

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Say this much about “ Keep Breathing ”: It’s admirably immune to streaming-era bloat.

Could its story, of a woman confronting the pain of her past while trying to stay alive after a plane crash, have been told in a ninety-minute film? Well, sure. But in six episodes that hew pretty close to the half-hour mark, the series makes its points, underlines them a couple of times, and then moves on.

Here, Melissa Barrera plays Liv, who is clinging to life (get it?). Liv had the misfortune to wheedle her way into a seat on a small plane headed into a remote area of Canada, which — after an astoundingly unconvincing crash that indicates just how little Netflix is spending on its non-marquee content — becomes her new home. Like a grown-up, corporate-lawyer version of the protagonist of the YA classic novel “Hatchet,” Liv is surprisingly adept at delving into her own resourcefulness to figure out how to survive. She’s also accompanied by the figures who haunt her thoughts, first among them one of the plane’s two co-pilots (Austin Stowell).

The pilot’s taunts egg her on toward survival; as she moves forward through time and energy ebbs away, things get hazier, as other figures from her past, from parents (Juan Pablo Espinosa and Florencia Lozano) to a lover (Jeff Wilbusch), emerge. “Keep Breathing’s” depiction of Liv’s organizing trauma is admirably diffuse — there isn’t one single bad thing that happened to her, but rather a series of vexed interpersonal relationships — but it can also seem unfocused.

Barrera does her best. The performance is strongest in present tense, as parallels between the struggle to survive and slightly less existential pains don’t always land. (There’s one jump cut between Liv vomiting in the forest and vomiting in her bathroom that seems notably poorly judged.) In all, “Keep Breathing” is, despite some nice moments, fairly forgettable — making its great achievement its willingness not to keep viewers on the hook for hours longer than necessary. Sometimes, that’s impressive enough.

“Keep Breathing” launches on Netflix on Thursday, July 28. 

Netflix. Six episodes (all screened for review).

• Production: Executive Producers: Martin Gero, Brendan Gall, and Maggie Kiley
• Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jeff Wilbusch , Austin Stowell, Juan Pablo Espinosa & Florencia Lozano

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, netflix's keep breathing can’t figure out how to balance all it wants to say.

Netflix’s “Keep Breathing” can’t decide what type of show it wants to be. On its face, it’s a typical survival adventure, in which  Melissa Barrera plays Liv, an unhappy lawyer who must fight to stay alive after her chartered plane crashes in the wilderness. The six-part series provides plenty of person-vs-nature drama: Liv forages for food, has an encounter with a bear, and figures out how to make fire.

A lot of this drama is compelling—her diving to recover supplies had me holding my breath too. Plus, the show does a great job of dramatizing the particular horror of being lost in the woods, the madness of walking in circles, the fear of never finding a way out. But sometimes Liv’s solutions are overly complicated. She flashes back to her time as a girl scout, remembering how to fashion a compass. Which, I suppose we all have some random tidbits of knowledge to draw upon in extreme situations. But she does that before remembering the sun sets in the West and rises in the East—a much lower-tech mechanism that’s more plausible (and that works).

The show also loses suspense by overlaying its wilderness drama with montages that reveal truths about nature and humans’ place within it. But these truths are hardly revelatory—think realizing you need to boil water after seeing a bunch of animals peeing in lakes. It’s more silly than insightful, making how the show reveals Liv’s thought process unintentionally funny.

“Keep Breathing” also folds in a psychological thriller with flashbacks to Liv’s past, revealing a long history of emotional wounds, both given and received. The main cause of Liv’s trauma appears to be her manic, artistic mother who charms and neglects her daughter before abandoning her. Some tough conversations with her father follow, leaving Liv unwilling to connect with others, perhaps particularly when they offer real companionship.

The show’s central conceit, that for some it is hard to ‘keep breathing,’ carries some weight. The combination of physiological study and survival drama also makes sense—with no one else to talk to, it’s natural to take a hard look at yourself. And Liv does reach some revelations: that she was not to blame for her mother’s actions, but she is responsible for her own; that love is valuable even when it can hurt; that her father was imperfect; that so is she.

But “Keep Breathing” does its heroine a disservice by tying her quest to an unplanned pregnancy. Her reason to keep fighting to survive is because of a fetus inside her. At particularly hard moments, she even pulls out the ultrasound and stares at it. It’s cliché and frustrating. Why can’t she want to live for herself? To honor her father? To achieve? To love herself, her friends, and perhaps her partner too? Women are more than uteruses, waiting to be fulfilled by a baby. That career-driven Liv would be so completely upended—taking her first and extremely ill-fated vacation because of a pregnancy—seems both easy and unrealistic. Let her be more complicated than that.

Indeed “Keep Breathing” shies away from the complication it sets up. Melissa Barrera is Mexican-born and arguably broke into US stardom via Latinx productions like “ Vida ” and “ In the Heights .” Her Liv is also Latina, although we don’t see much more than the fact of her identity. Yes, Liv and both her parents speak Spanish but how exactly little Liv learned the language with parents who primarily speak English is unclear. When who speaks what and how well is so political in our community that this shortcut feels like a betrayal. Not to mention, "Keep Breathing" doesn’t so much as dip into Liv’s feeling about being one of the few Latinas in a competitive New York law firm or how she was treated by her largely white girl scout troop. It all goes unexamined.

Which is a shame. Barrera has proven she can handle more nuanced work than “Keep Breathing” gives her, despite her almost always being in the frame. In this production, she toggles easily between charming and standoffish, giving Liv a compelling humanity not entirely in the script. Barrera also excels at the body adventure aspect of the show, building upon the physicality she displayed in “ Scream .”

But this is where “Keep Breathing” truly fails her and its audience. The final third of the show devolves into body punishment as Liv experiences a series of increasingly severe injuries. After leaving her mostly intact for the first two acts, the story's insistence on punishing Liv at the end borders on misogyny. All the physiological growth, lessons about survival, and even broader connections to the cosmos fall to the side in favor of watching Liv become ever more battered. There's no joy or broader point to it. It's simply the spectacle of destroying a powerful woman’s body.

When the finale portrays Liv taking one last breath, it's simultaneously inevitable, overdue, and preposterous, which is particularly frustrating for a show with so many good elements. It's too bad that “Keep Breathing” can't figure out how to put them all together.

Whole season screened for review. Premieres on Netflix today, July 27 th .  

Cristina Escobar

Cristina Escobar is the co-founder of LatinaMedia.Co, a digital publication uplifting Latina and gender non-conforming Latinx perspectives in media.

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

By mads lennon | jul 27, 2022.

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.

Next. Keep Breathing cast: Who stars in the survival drama series?. dark

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When a small plane crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, a lone woman must battle the elements and odds to survive. When a small plane crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, a lone woman must battle the elements and odds to survive. When a small plane crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, a lone woman must battle the elements and odds to survive.

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Keep Breathing review: A tediously predictable tale of survival

A strangely glamorous and one-dimensional melissa barrera braves the elements and her inner demons after a plane crash, article bookmarked.

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Deep into the pandemic, as most of the world existed behind closed doors, TV decided it was time to reinvent the Lost era. Two variations of a plane crash storyline were born. The Wilds took a unique approach in 2020, following a group of unsuspecting girls who become stranded on an island for experimental purposes. Then 2021’s Yellowjackets had a more traditional angle, following an all-girl soccer team whose fight for survival turns them into ruthless cannibals. Just when we thought all iterations of this narrative were exhausted, Netflix has now decided to have its fun.

In the six-episode limited series, Keep Breathing – from co-creators Brendan Gall and Martin Gero ( The Lovebirds ) – Liv ( In the Heights star Melissa Barrera ), a New York security litigations lawyer, finds herself the lone survivor of a plane crash. Stranded in the Canadian wilderness, she must brave the elements as well as her inner demons in order to stay alive.

When we first meet Liv, she’s frantically chewing out an airline assistant. She must get to the remote town of Inuvik today. After her pleas are shot down, she miraculously manages to convince two strangers to let her hitch a ride on their private jet. Soon afterwards, she’s flying over beautiful snow-capped mountains crowded with deep emerald pine trees.

Liv is dozing off one moment; the next, she’s in a frantic descent. In true survival drama fashion, the screen goes black. But what follows is more high-end glamping than rough and ready endurance. Completely unscathed, Liv tirelessly swims to the shore. She sets up camp just in time for nightfall, choosing an oversized pine branch as a stand-in blanket. Days pass before she has her first sip of water, and her only nourishment is a handful of berries. Still, her hair remains perfectly coiffed and her face pristine.

Between failed attempts at fly fishing and searches for phone service, we’re offered dreary glimpses into Liv’s backstory, largely told through flashbacks and hallucinations. While these elements have dramatic potential – her father’s recent death, her mentally ill mother abandoning her during childhood, and her current pregnancy with a coworker she keeps at a cold distance – Liv’s character still manages to feel ridiculously one-dimensional.

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In one overdone scene, an apparition of Liv’s mother tries to push her to give up and take her own life. Although this moment is supposed to show Liv’s resilience, as she chooses to instead chip away at a literal boulder that’s pinned her down, the improbability of this scene far outweighs its intentions.

Where its predecessors were inventive in their approach, Keep Breathing plods along, tediously unrealistic and painfully predictable. You might even find yourself rooting for Liv’s demise in an effort to stir up some excitement.

‘Keep Breathing’ is streaming on Netflix now

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Keep Breathing: Limited Series Review

Predictable and uninspired..

Keep Breathing streams on Netflix on July 28, 2022.

The survival drama is a paint-by-numbers formula. Take a terrified individual or group, drop them into the harsh wilderness, and follow them as they fall apart. Sprinkle in some interpersonal issues, and boom! You've got an easy show for just about any audience to follow…But that doesn’t always mean you’ve got something good, and unfortunately, Keep Breathing, Netflix’s latest take on the genre, is serviceable at best.

The limited series is an uninspired take on what shows like Lost did first – forcing “normal” people to survive in the wilderness – without any of the supernatural elements that made that series interesting. It’s a weird mishmash of action and melodrama that somehow manages to make surviving in the wild even less exciting than our heroine’s personal flashbacks. The result? An extremely rote series that's mercifully over in just six episodes.

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Attorney Liv (Melissa Barrera) has made it her mission to meet someone near the Canadian wilderness before she returns to her normal life, but her flight has been canceled. Desperate, she turns to two men she finds in the airport headed to the same destination. They reluctantly agree to take her with them, but disaster strikes when the plane goes down. With both men eventually succumbing to their injuries and the plane submerged underwater, Liv must survive on her own as long as she possibly can…with little hope of being rescued.

It's all extremely standard survival fare: the work-first attorney struggles to adapt to the situation, all while reflecting on the failures that led up to this moment. Interspersed with colorful vignettes that give us a peek into Liv's life before the crash, Keep Breathing showcases the young lawyer's determination to survive the wilderness – even if that means burning piles of money she finds in luggage and burying the oxycodone she found with it.

What's the best survival drama?

Because as it turns out, living alone in the wilderness is hard . This show really wants to remind you of this fact every time you tune in, and about how hard its protagonist is working to make sure she stays alive. Liv dives underwater again and again to recover equipment from the plane, only to find herself face to face with a hungry bear tearing through her food stores. She doesn’t quite know where to take shelter at first. There’s nothing to distract her from her absent mother and doting father’s death…or the skeletons in her closet. But she finds a way, of course, because Keep Breathing wants us to root for Liv, even when she’s as milquetoast of a survivor as humanly possible.

As resourceful as Liv appears to be, figuring out which berries are okay to eat and crafting her own compass, she also shows little common sense. Why burn piles of money when there's plenty of wood around to set ablaze? And why dump out perfectly good medication (despite the potential for complications) when there are dangers lurking around every corner? It would come in handy if she happened to break her arm or get in a tussle with a bear. There’s no real explanation for these decisions, other than the fact that it’s just more dramatic that way, apparently. An attorney burning money? Seems a bit on the nose.

And of course, there also comes a particularly predictable reveal that often surrounds women in movies and TV who are facing already-difficult predicaments. For spoiler reasons, we won’t say exactly what that reveal entails, but it sets up exactly the kind of staid writing I'd expect from anything where a strong woman is meant to pull herself out of a seemingly insurmountable situation.

This twist adds little to the plot and only serves as a reminder that, if there's a chance for a woman to star in a series where she must use everything at her disposal to survive, she's still somehow got to be taking care of someone else. Because the last thing a woman should be taking care of is herself, apparently, and writing like this only serves to drive that harmful narrative home.

Otherwise, it seems the rest of Liv’s time willing herself to survive is dominated by men as well. If she’s not lost in thought about the death of her father, she’s daydreaming about her on- and off-again relationship with coworker Danny (Jeff Wilbusch), or tormented by Sam (Austin Stowell), one of the men she hitched a ride with.

Frustratingly, there's no real explanation for why Sam was so intent on no one coming out to save them after the plane crash. Assuming the men’s Cessna departed from the same airport Liv had visited, it had to have communicated with air traffic controllers. There's some sort of record, to be sure, of the flight and even its potential destination, despite what Sam says, requiring a bit too much suspension of disbelief from us.

There's also no reason for a device the series goes on to use: the deceased Sam acting as a negative voice that continues to tell Liv she's going to die. She has no personal connection to Sam prior to the accident, and he serves no real purpose other than to be a detractor so we can feel good about Liv's victories. And from what we knew about him during his brief time alive, there's little reason to assume he'd be this unfriendly to someone struggling to keep herself alive long enough to seek rescue.

On the bright side, Keep Breathing is visually pleasing, with fantastic camera work, an inspired score, and great acting from its core cast. It’s so unfortunate, then, that it fails to deliver any real staying power thanks to a boring setup and an even more boring cast of characters that fail to make any real impression. The best there is to say? Keep Breathing is an average show, at least, if you just need something to watch.

Upcoming New Netflix Movies in 2022

Keep Breathing is well-shot, well-acted, and well-intentioned. But as far as the story itself goes, there’s just no reason to watch this middling take on the survival genre when there are so many other series that have done it better. Liv’s plight isn’t engrossing, the wrap-up isn’t satisfying, and the life of a high-powered lawyer with familial and relationship problems celebrating rubbing two sticks together to make fire doesn’t exactly make for great TV.

In This Article

More Reviews by Brittany Vincent

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The Ending of 'Keep Breathing,' Explained

Does Liv make it out of the woods?

The new Netflix miniseries Keep Breathing shows a woman's thrilling journey as she tries to survive the wilderness alone. In its low-key terrifying set-up, New York lawyer Liv (played by In the Heights ' Melissa Barrera ) catches a flight on an unchartered private plane to meet her estranged mother in northwest Canada. After the plane crashes, leaving Liv alone with no one knowing where she is, the young woman struggles to get back to civilization.

The six-episode series is filled with surprises, from Liv's travel companions actually being drug runners to the lawyer having a tense run-in with a bear. It also turns out that Liv's pregnant, and that she was looking for the mother who abandoned her as a child so she could see whether she would actually be a good mom. In the final episodes, through memories and hallucinations, Liv finds a path to healing from her trauma, and maybe getting out of the intense ordeal.

Liv has hallucinations about her father and her boyfriend Danny.

The finale begins with Liv surviving her fall from the cliff edge, thanks in part to her hitting several tree branches on the way down. Once she lands, she has bruising and is in a state of shock, during which she hallucinates a conversation with her doctor about finding de-stressing activities while she's pregnant. Eventually, she gets lost in the memory of her deceased father, remembering his encouragement to "get up" every morning as she gets her bearings and continues to walk north.

Her memories throughout the day skew toward her parents, as she recalls painting as a child (a talent she shared with her mother), as well as caring for her ill father as an adult. As she walks, she has a bucket list moment as she witnesses the Northern Lights. She then hallucinates Danny, telling him that she should have told him that she's pregnant. She also says that she does believe she'll be a good mother, something that has been troubling her throughout the show.

Liv realizes she doesn't need to meet her mom.

During a heavy downpour, Liv remembers a conversation between herself and her dying father, where she asks why he never gave her the postcards from her mother. Her dad says that they were not for her, but she says he had no right to decide whether she could see them. Eventually she kisses his forehead as a seeming sign of forgiveness, and after he reassures he'll always stay by her side, he dies.

After her memory is over, Liv hears a rushing noise and thinks that she's by a road, but it's actually an aggressive river. As she loses hope, she hallucinates her father, who says that he feels the presence of her mother when he's around nature. Liv admits that she thought by finding her mother, she could discover the truth about herself, but she now realizes her journey to find her mom was impulsive. Her dad tells her that she's only like her mother in her "eyes and smile," but that nothing else is like her. As Liv realizes she doesn't need to meet the woman who abandoned her, the hallucination of her dad tells her to rest and hands her the postcards.

Liv floats down the river.

After that final realization, having reckoned with everything that troubled her before the plane crash and begun to heal, Liv taps into the never-give-up attitude she got from her father. She grabs a log and enters the river, hoping that it will take her to civilization. As she floats, she thinks of a future: having the baby and reuniting with Danny. In between the dreams, we see fishermen find Liv by the river. As we see a flash of her happy family, Liv coughs up water and takes a breath.

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The show's creators confirmed that Liv did survive.

Some viewers have questioned whether Liv was actually rescued in the final scene, which is fair considering the show's plentiful flashbacks. However, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly , co-creators Martin Gero and Brendan Gall gave a definite answer on whether Liv lives.

"The ending is literal in that she survives," Gall told the outlet. "We see her wake up again and take that breath. The ambiguous part, the part up for interpretation, is whether the images of her and Danny going to the hospital are flash forwards or her imagined future when she believes she's dying. Both are valid."

"But she survives. She absolutely survives," Gero added, driving the point home.

With the confirmation that the show's heroine does make it through her river journey, there is a possibility that Keep Breathing may get a second season. The show is billed as a limited series on Netflix, but there's always a chance that a miniseries' success will lead to a renewal (see Big Little Lies or The White Lotus ). It also helps that star Barrera would be up to return to the character.

"When I watched it, I turned to [creator Martin Gero] and I was like, 'Should we make a season two? I want to go back,'" she told PopSugar . "It just took me back to the experience of making it, and even though it was the hardest thing I've ever done, it was so rewarding and so satisfying and so fun. And all the best things that you would want in a role, I had with this." 

Quinci LeGardye is a Contributing Culture Editor who covers TV, movies, Korean entertainment, books, and pop culture. When she isn’t writing or checking Twitter, she’s probably watching the latest K-drama or giving a concert performance in her car.

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Keep Breathing: Limited Series Reviews

The show practically forgets about her wilderness survival, touching base with her just long enough for her to tumble off some precipice or other, resulting in another bout of fever-dream flashbacks.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 12, 2022

It’s an easy and largely satisfying binge -- 6 episodes of 30-40 minutes apiece, not that much longer than a modern superhero film.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2022

Visual charm and breathtaking scenery make a strong showing in this tale of survival and memories.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 3, 2022

[Producers] couldn't have found someone more capable than Melissa Barrera... dynamic, tough, with a survival spirit. It's impressive. [Full review in Spanish]

Keep Breathing wasn't what I expected, but executive producers and co-showrunners and writers Brendan Gall and Martin Gero and Maggie Kiley take viewers on a thrilling adventure and remind us that there's a difference between life and actually living.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 2, 2022

Come for the scenery here and stay around for the solo acting, but don’t expect to be fully, thrillingly engaged.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2022

Keep Breathing is well-shot, well-acted, and well-intentioned. But as far as the story itself goes, there’s just no reason to watch this middling take on the survival genre when there are so many other series that have done it better.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 29, 2022

Melissa Barrera’s performance will hook the viewers of Keep Breathing, but the show is also helped by the episodes’ brevity and tight plotting.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2022

The episodes are relatively and mercifully short, with most running 30-some-odd minutes; even so, the show can't entirely escape the common sensation of a movie concept stretched out to roughly twice that length.

Where its predecessors were inventive in their approach, Keep Breathing plods along, tediously unrealistic and painfully predictable. You might even find yourself rooting for Liv’s demise in an effort to stir up some excitement.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 29, 2022

Keep Breathing isn't a perfect series, but it is a good one, and that's thanks to Melissa Barrera's strength on screen —and her vulnerability too.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 29, 2022

A fresh, gripping story that seems ripped from the headlines, with a powerful female lead who refuses to give up.

Well-intended, it jumps the narrative tracks in its final two episodes, making even its short six-chapter run seem extra padded — an 80-minute feature would have done the job better.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 28, 2022

Even without being hamstrung by context, there is not much to detain you here. Keep Breathing is determinedly basic stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 28, 2022

Keep Breathing is not a groundbreaking project, but its mental health themes and storytelling make it easy to recommend.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5 | Jul 28, 2022

A show with so many good elements ... it's too bad that Keep Breathing can't figure out how to put them all together.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2022

Keep Breathing is, despite some nice moments, fairly forgettable -- making its great achievement its willingness not to keep viewers on the hook for hours longer than necessary. Sometimes, that’s impressive enough.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2022

I kept waiting for the show to find a twistier engine or more surprising emotional gear that never materialized.

There is barely any shock or even excitement regarding Liv’s ability to survive a situation. The thrill only lessens with every episode, with new troubles thrown into the way for the sake of it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2022

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Keep breathing ending explained (in detail).

The new Netflix survival thriller Keep Breathing puts its heroine Liv through the wringer, but does she make it out alive in season 1's ending?

The new Netflix survival drama Keep Breathing strands its star Melissa Barrera in the Northern wilderness, and the show’s ending reveals whether or not her character Liv survived her ordeal. Survival drama has been making a comeback in recent years, with movies like 2017’s Jungle and TV shows like the underrated 2021 mystery series  Yellowjackets  focusing on the perennially popular topic of likable protagonists being forced to endure unimaginable hardship. Netflix’s new miniseries  Keep Breathing is the latest in this string of recent survival drama hits.

Starring Scream 2022 heroine Melissa Barrera, Keep Breathing tells the simple, self-contained story of Liv. An ambitious lawyer who has little time for life outside work, Liv focuses all of her time and attention on her job as a securities litigator and has no bandwidth for a romantic or personal life. This proves to be a problem for the Netflix show series heroine when Liv abruptly leaves work without informing anyone and hops on a plane to visit her estranged mother in Inuvik.

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The issue is that Liv’s plane is delayed and she fears that a later arrival will cause her to miss a reunion with her mother, which is the purpose of her ill-fated trip. Unlike the unfortunate anti-heroines of Yellowjackets , Liv’s brutal wilderness survival trek is at least partially caused by a last-minute decision that she makes while panicked at the airport. Overhearing two men conversing about their private plan trip passing through Inuvik, Liv offers the men a thousand dollars each to bring her to the remote Canadian town. The duo accepts the bargain but, when their plane crashes and the two men perish, Live discovers that Sam and George weren’t the pilot and nature photographer they claimed to be and, as such, no character in the Netflix original series knows where they — or she — are.

What Happens In Keep Breathing’s Season 1 Ending

Liv is forced to abandon Sam and George when the latter dies in the crash and the former dies soon after. Alone in the wilderness, Liv endures almost drowning, numerous injuries, hallucinations, and even an encounter with a wild bear that calls to mind Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon . Throughout Keep Breathing season 1, Liv’s flashbacks to her tumultuous upbringing and recent romance with a co-worker Danny are interspersed alongside her ordeal in the wilderness. Liv’s difficult relationship with her unstable mother, Lucia, was unexpectedly severed when Lucia abandoned Liv and her father in her childhood. After her father’s death, Liv discovered that Lucia had been sending postcards announcing her new locations, all of which Liv’s father hid from her. After learning she is pregnant, Liv decided to visit her mother to ensure she had not inherited her instability. This led to the Netflix studio show's trip to Inuvik and eventually results in a dehydrated, severely unwell Liv hallucinating a cathartic conversation with her mother in Keep Breathing ’s penultimate episode.

Who Survives Keep Breathing's Season 1 Ending?

Very few named characters make it out of Keep Breathing season 1 alive, as the series proves as efficient with dispatching characters as the killers in Barrera’s earlier hit Scream 2022 . Of the main cast, both Sam and George (the plane’s pilot and only other passenger) die, while Liv’s father dies during a flashback that establishes her backstory. However, Liv’s supportive, loving co-worker Danny survives and the couple even has a child together in the closing moments of the season finale of the Netflix series (wherein Liv’s rescue from a river is intercut with her giving birth to a child months after making a full recovery from her ordeal). Meanwhile, Liv’s co-worker Ruth presumably survives and her mother Lucia might be alive in Inuvik (although it seems unlikely that Liv will visit her now, having gotten the closure she sought and the reassuring confirmation that she is not her mother from their hallucinated conversation in a cave).

Does Liv Meet Her Mother In Keep Breathing’s Ending?

Some of Netflix’s surprising twist endings can be frustrating as they seem designed to shock viewers at the expense of credibility, but a well-placed surprise can strengthen the story of the preceding series, which often pays off for many  Netflix original shows . For example, in Keep Breathing season 1, the entire purpose of Liv’s trip was to meet her mother for the first time since her childhood. As such, it is a huge surprise when Keep Breathing season 1 ends with Liv never being reunited with her mother. When Liv is pulled out of a rushing river by two passing fishermen and brought back to life via CPR, the closing moments of Keep Breathing season 1 reassure viewers that her life will be a less brutal endurance test from here on out.

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Audiences see Liv reunited with Danny, giving birth to the couple’s child, and smiling as part of the happy new family. However, while this ending leaves little room for a season 2 (unlike Yellowjackets ),  it could be a surprise for some viewers that at no point is a reunion between Liv and her mother Lucia depicted in the montage. The Netflix original show has a closing scene that is clearly intended to assuage concerns that Liv’s life will continue to be full of brutal hardship (which is a reasonable fear for viewers to have, after the trauma the character has endured in Keep Breathing season 1). However, there is a good reason that Keep Breathing does not reassure viewers with the sight of Liv and her mother happily reunited.

Why Liv Couldn’t Meet Her Mother In Keep Breathing’s Ending

The reason that Liv wanted to reunite with her mother was not to reconcile and discuss Lucia’s choice to abandon her daughter years earlier, but rather to ensure that she wouldn’t turn out like Lucia. Liv, especially after learning she was pregnant, feared she would grow into her mother. The fear of hereditary mental illness that Hereditary , The Haunting of Hill House , Relic , and other recent psychological horror movies , shows, and stories have explored emerges at this point, as Liv’s attempted meeting with her mother is driven by fear rather than any desire to reconnect. As such, in the ending of Keep Breathing season 1, Liv’s survival and her optimistic outlook on life prove to her that she has not inherited her mother’s instability. The fact that Liv made it through her ordeal and survived its physical traumas, as well as the myriad hallucinations and moments of suicidal ideation, means she no longer fears becoming Lucia, allowing the  Keep Breathing  season 1 ending to reassure its heroine.

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‘keep breathing’ review: melissa barrera can’t save netflix’s sketchy survival drama.

Melissa Barrera plays a Manhattan lawyer forced to fend for herself in the Canadian wilderness in this one-woman limited-series spin on 'Yellowjackets.'

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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For TV critics, this week’s theme is less-buzzy new versions of some of the buzziest shows of the past year. It will be a fun game to see how many reviews discuss Peacock’s The Resort without mentioning HBO’s The White Lotus in the first paragraph (when the more apt comparison is actually Apple TV+’s Acapulco ) or Amazon’s Paper Girls without mentioning Netflix ‘s Stranger Things (when the more apt comparison is actually Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club ).

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Cast: Melissa Barrera

Creators: Martin Gero and Brendan Gall

I have at least successfully avoided mentioning Showtime’s Yellowjackets until several sentences into my review of Netflix’s Keep Breathing , a so-called limited series that is unquestionably most easily described as a one-woman version of Yellowjackets without any of the sensationalistic — or “fun,” if you prefer — aspects that made Yellowjackets an Emmy-nominated mini-sensation. No ritualistic cannibalism, killer ’90s soundtrack or intimations of the supernatural? No problem!

I admired Keep Breathing for its stripped-down — six episodes, each under 40 minutes, making it the Peak TV version of getting your name painted on a grain of rice — integrity and for the latest confirmation of Melissa Barrera ‘s always watchable star power. But I kept waiting for the show to find a twistier engine or more surprising emotional gear that never materialized.

Created by L.A. Complex veterans Marin Gero and Brendan Gall, Keep Breathing stars Barrera as Liv, a Manhattan attorney trying desperately to get to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories for reasons that will eventually become clear, if never quite interesting. Liv is harboring one or two big secrets, which will become important after she has to hitch a ride on a small plane with the shady George (Mike Dopud) and Sam (Austin Stowell), who immediately become completely irrelevant when the plane crashes somewhere in the Canadian wilderness.

Every once in a while in the first couple of episodes, Keep Breathing hints at more heightened drama, without quite resorting to the contrivances that tend to supersede “making shelter” or “finding food” in filmed survival stories. There’s a bear. George and Sam work for some potentially scary people. One of Liv’s secrets is particularly precarious. But every time you start thinking that this is when Keep Breathing advances past its very basic hook, it quickly retreats. So many survival stories feel the inexplicable (to me) need to add bonus stakes when “life and death” theoretically should be enough. But if I’d never previously understood why anybody would think this genre required misplaced polar bears or scary human sacrifices for added tension, maybe now I do?

My most frequent move lately has been saying that various limited series would have been better off as movies, but Keep Breathing wouldn’t work better as a movie. It would, however, probably be a very fun book — preferably one written in the first person so that Liv’s internal journey through her troubled past might feel organic instead of sapping the suspense any time she goes from justifiable panic at her predicament to remembering her hesitant flirtations with Wilbusch’s Danny or the nagging insecurities that she’s becoming her mother or becoming her father. On the page, it would all just be filtered through her memories, as opposed to on-screen, where you can’t help but be aware that even if Keep Breathing is entirely Liv’s story, a lot of time is spent on secondary characters so weakly written that none of the supporting performances emerges as even the least bit memorable.

One could, again, choose the generous interpretation that because Liv doesn’t know herself, she similarly can’t know the people in her flashbacks. And since her isolation is at least 25 percent metaphorical, it wouldn’t make sense to give her richly realized foils to interact with.

Barrera has to carry Keep Breathing in a way that no single actor in Yellowjackets has to do, and she nails that level of heavy lifting. Unfortunately, Liv’s backstory has to carry Keep Breathing in a way none of the comparably simplistic backstories ever had to carry Lost . If you didn’t care about the origin of Jack’s tattoos, a different Lost flashback was just a week away, but if you don’t invest in Liv’s various insecurities, there’s nothing else here. Too often, when it comes to Keep Breathing , there’s nothing else there — not that the six speedy episodes, with their pretty cinematography and solid lead performance, ever make the viewing painful.

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Keep Breathing

When a small plane crashes in the middle of the canadian wilderness, lone survivor liv must battle the elements and her own personal demons to survive in this thriller series, keep breathing..

Thriller series are huge on Netflix with the likes of Pieces of Her turning into mega-hits for the streaming platform. And now Keep Breathing can be added to that list.

Created by Martin Gero and Brendan Gall for Netflix, Keep Breathing stars Melissa Barrera as Liv, a razor-sharp attorney whose private plane crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

Stuck in the remote Canadian frontier and the lone survivor of the plane crash, Liv must battle both an unforgiving terrain and past personal traumas to stay alive.

Keep Breathing Official Trailer

Is Keep Breathing Worth Watching?

Keep Breathing is a survival thriller series and with such a limited cast a lot of the work to carry the show falls on the shoulders of Melissa Barrera.

The story jumps between timelines so one minute Liv is trying to survive, and the next she's flashing back to her childhood or her job as a New York lawyer.

It keeps the story moving because if it was just her trying to get out of the remote Canadian frontier then it could pretty boring over six episodes.

The two main plots of this story are can she escape and what exactly happened in her life to lead her to this moment?

Finding out is interesting, and to be fair to Melissa Barrera she is very good in this series.

It's a thriller with an interesting story, plenty of survival action and with a few twists and turns along the way.

The show’s audience and critics’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes are, in a word, terrible. One internet reviewed even wrote “the only likable character was the bear”. On the flip side, reviewers on IMDB claimed the show suffered “from the wrong expectations”, explaining that the series was promoted as a survival drama but in reality it's a drama about a woman struggling with a lifetime of hurt and rejection.

Keep Breathing Release Date

The upcoming survival thriller was ordered by Netflix in February 2021. It began filming in June 2021, wrapping three months later.

Netflix dropped the trailer on June 30th 2022 and announced that Keep Breathing would premiere on July 28th 2022 .

Keep Breathing Cast

Due to the nature of the show, the cast for Keep Breathing is limited.

The first three episodes were directed by Maggie Kiley with the other three directed by Rebecca Rodriguez.

Melissa Barrera as Liv, a New York attorney who crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

Jeff Wilbusch as Danny, Liv's on-again, off-again love interest.

Florencia Lozano as Liv's mother

Juan Pablo Espinosa as Liv's father

Austin Stowell

• Amazing Scenery
• Decent Storyline
• Very Well Acted
• A Lot Of Timeline Jumping
• Minimal Cast

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Edward August 9, 2022, 7:20 pm

Really wanted to like it but that did not happen. Good scenery but the jumping back and forth from history to present, the hallucinations and the unpleasant way this is unfolded to the viewer had us changing from supporting the heroine to please get a bear in here to end this thing…

Jackie August 4, 2022, 11:27 pm

The wanna be boyfriend that keeps showing up is annoying as f. What’s the point of him continuing to disrupt the movie? Feels like two separate movies trying to merge as one but it doesn’t work.

rob July 29, 2022, 8:31 pm

After one episode watching with my family we were so bored we switched it off. Why was this ever produced

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