Keep Breathing - A Netflix Series Review

Giving up is not on the list. It’s time to fight for survival.

Keep Breathing aired on Netflix in 2022. Bribing her way onto a small plane, Liv’s luck runs out when it crashes into the middle of the Canadian wilderness. Alone without supplies, Liv battles the elements as she thinks back on memories.

We have seen these types of wilderness survival concepts, but I put Keep Breathing on my radar anyway. The series could have been better in a lot of ways. Keep Breathing is meant to be a series about survival and yet we spend too much time on flashbacks.

I have seen Melissa Berrara in two other films, one of them being Scream (2022). I had mixed reactions to her performance in that, but Berrera exceeds an emotionally driven undertaking of a young woman coming to terms with her past. Some of her reactions were awkward but that was mainly due to how she was directed.

Liv is not the most self-sufficient person but she has been through a lot. Bererra has most of the screen for the whole series. That is until the flashbacks. A ridiculous amount of flashbacks are incorporated into the six-episode series. These flashbacks show viewers every mistake, relationship, and family hardship that Liv has experienced.

I get that being stranded in the wilderness is a time to reflect, but it’s not what the series is about. Keep Breathing is about Liv’s survival in the wilderness. Flashbacks should have been minimal. I liked Liv’s struggles to survive on her own, figuring out different strategies.

Other credits include Florencia Lozano, Joselyn Picard, Jeff Wilbusch, Juan Pablo Espinosa, Getenesh Berhe, and Austin Stowell. Aside from a couple of actors, most characters felt like props since they were only here for the flashbacks.

It was strange what people Liv thought about, especially when she needed someone to talk to on the island, like Sam, the pilot of the plane who she had only known for a couple of hours. She had more significant people than him in her life!

The makeup crew should have been notified on how to properly portray someone fighting for their lives in the wild. It wasn’t until the final two episodes that Liv looked exhausted, beat up, and hair completely wrecked! How does someone still have makeup on after crashing into the water?

You can always move on from the past. That is the moral of Keep Breathing. No matter the situation, breathe, and you’ll get through it. Martin Gero and Brandon Gall did a good job instilling this moral but more time should have been dictated to the show’s realism.

The first episode looked promising until diving into all the flashbacks by the second episode. I tuned out at most of the flashbacks. I don’t get why they were so necessary. You forget that she is stranded in the wilderness.

There’s hardly any dialogue in Keep Breathing, in the wilderness scenes that is. We don’t have enough series that are primarily established on action. The dialogue contains most of what you’d hear in every romantic film or family problem situation. Watching Liv conquer strides in the wilderness is a peaceful endeavor.

Gero and Gall picked a great area to film in. It was picturesque with the lake, skyline, and all the trees surrounding you. Like Liv, we also feel lost whenever she walked through the forest. The sense of struggle is believable. The series did a good job conducting the overall suspense.

It is worth checking out Keep Breathing on Netflix. I was still hooked after each episode concluded.