'The Last Cruise' Trailer: HBO's Depressing Documentary Follows The Ill-Fated Cruise In The Early Days Of COVID

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With visual precision and remarkable intimacy, Hannah Olson's documentary "The Last Cruise" recalls the harrowing 40-day quarantine aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the outset of the pandemic. On January 20, 2020—the same day when the World Health Organization first reported cases of COVID-19 appearing outside of Wuhan, China—the cruiseliner set sail on a prototypical journey on the high seas. The trip took its multinational manifest of passengers and crew from Japan to Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and back to Japan’s Port of Yokohama.

THE LAST CRUISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

It's revealed that at least a third of the crew members who tested positive for COVID-19 by around the Feb. 9 mark didn't have any symptoms. Dede, a dishwasher who was particularly excited about being able to work on a cruise ship, highlights that there was no separation between crew members that were infected and those who weren't. The crew was also scared to report that they were sick or even to complain about the conditions. Initial screening by the Japanese Ministry of Health found that 10 people had tested positive for COVID-19.

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Passengers were quarantined in their staterooms for weeks while the number of cases on board skyrocketed. Meanwhile, the crew tended to the passengers, delivered room service and slept and dined in cramped, shared quarters. They'd become what we'd later term "essential workers." The ship would ultimately account for the first citizens of Argentina, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, and New Zealand  to test positive for COVID-19. The quarantined Diamond Princess floating in a Japanese harbor became a global spectacle – a faraway symbol of the new virus and its potential to upend any sense of normalcy.

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Dede gives a brief tour of the crew quarters, which are tiny rooms below deck, with no windows, beds stacked; so much for the glamor of working on a cruise ship, but at least he gets to see the world, he says. Daya, meanwhile, is a single mother who works 13-hour days and makes $997 a month, barely enough to feed, clothe and house her three kids. We get far too brief updates on our amateur videographers and how they’re doing, and there’s a noticeable lack of interviews with medical experts or cruise officials. (One can understand why the latter would be reluctant to appear on camera.) Still, director Olson and her team have done an amazing job of weaving together the cell phone footage into a cohesive timeline of a stunning crisis in the nascent days of the pandemic that shook the world. In the suites, passengers are dealing with an admittedly difficult situation, but they have meals brought to their rooms and they can sit on a balcony and get some fresh air.

The entire thing is chronicled in a documentary short from HBO, aptly titled The Last Cruise. If a cruise ship had been quarantined in the early days of a pandemic a generation ago, we’d have only still photographs and perhaps some choppy and grainy videotape recording of events as they played out in real time. Spanning just 40 minutes, “The Last Cruise” opens with title cards explaining the Diamond Princess set sail from Japan on Jan. 20, 2020, when only a few cases of the coronavirus had been reported worldwide. It certainly wasn’t a concern for the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess, as evidenced by the home video we see at the outset of the story.

​A look at the events aboard the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise that was the center of the first big COVID-19 outbreak outside of Wuhan. ‘The Last Cruise’ is available on Hulu, but only for viewers who have HBO Max added to their Hulu subscriptions. If you have an HBO Max subscription added to your Hulu account, you can watch the documentary by clicking here.

As information about thecoronavirus pandemic rapidly changes, PEOPLE is committed to providing the most recent data in our coverage. Some of the information in this story may have changed after publication. When the U.S. government studied what transpired on the ship, it was determined that COVID-19 was airborne and spread through asymptomatic carriers.

Documentary filmmaker Hannah Olson (Baby God) pieced together the story with footage shot by passengers and crew, and the result is a concise, 40-minute film capturing in microcosm the global crisis that followed. As we quickly learn, that was hardly the case, and our new friends aboard the ship have the video to prove it. After 10 people onboard had tested positive, the captain announced, “It has been confirmed that the ship will remain under quarantine in Yokohama.

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In a PEOPLE exclusive look at the first trailer for the film, director Hannah Olson (Baby God) documents multiple first-person accounts of what transpired in the month and a half that passengers and crew found themselves trapped on the ship. HBO's latest documentary takes on the nightmare aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Diamond Princess cruise ship is docked in Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 16, 2020, while passengers remained quarantined on board. When the Diamond Princess cruise set sail from Yokohama, Japan on Jan. 20, 2020, with 2,666 passengers and 1,045 crew members, there were still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19. In 40 minutes, The Last Cruise showcases videos taken by both passengers and the crew for a first-hand account of what it was like to be on the ship as concerns around COVID-19 became more serious.

For the guests on board, it’s a chance to experience a bygone era of decadent luxury, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free weekly newsletter to get the biggest news of the week delivered to your inbox every Friday. Social distancing wasn’t easy for crew members of the Diamond Princess as they continued working to feed the passengers and disinfect the ship. Although it happened more than a year ago, even if you're aware of the events, it's still incredibly eerie to see how quickly the virus spread and it makes you uncomfortable to see delays to measures like wearing masks. Sonali Thakkar, who worked security on the ship, reveals that as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the ship continued to rise, there was a rumour that there was a plan to sink the ship with people on board, which was frightening for her. Eventually, cruise employees were taking everyone's temperatures, with several passenger calling it simply an "inconvenience" to their vacation.

It is about the COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess.[1][2] It premiered at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival[3] and was released on March 30, 2021 by HBO. These conditions of late-stage capitalism still color the worldwide pandemic response. The United States will soon own an excess of COVID-19 vaccines, for instance, while “at least 30 countries [the poorer ones] have not yet injected a single person,” per the New York Times. Just as the Diamond Princess made for a bellwether to warn of the virus being airborne, their example shows how the world is “one team” until the evacuation begins. The contours of Olson's modestly shaped documentary reveal anxiety, panic, and indulgence—it's the the alarm we were missing a year ago, and we're still hitting the snooze button. The Reading Group Center chatted with Kate about her inspiration behind the book’s 1950s theme, how her novel points to greater issues in our world today, and what she thinks book clubs should be talking about.

A total of 712 people contracted COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and 14 died. In the documentary Maruja Daya, a pastry chef, says she felt like "the rich would be taken care of," expressing concerns that the crew was still working when they were also at risk of being infected. Phones had to be answered, cleaning had to be done, food had to be made and delivered. Directed and produced by Hannah Olson and produced by Shane Boris, Joe Beshenkovsky, and James A Smith, The Last Cruise is a bit of a depressing documentary due in part to its release by HBO before the pandemic has even ended. Though vaccines have been rolling out successfully, it's hard to drum up the interest to watch a documentary about an ordeal we're all still in, even if the sheer paranoia of the early days of COVID-19 has mostly abated by now. All three of my main characters presented themselves more or less simultaneously as soon as I started mulling over the best way to tell this story—I wanted access to all parts of the boat, so I needed a passenger, an entertainment crew member, and a belowdecks worker.

The Last Cruise debuts on HBO Max a year to the day after the nightmare it documents ended. On March 30, 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship finally left the Japanese harbor where it sat for weeks due to a COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine. More than 700 of the 3,711 people aboard tested positive during the ordeal, and 14 died; the ship ended up being a ground zero of sorts for study of the highly infectious virus.

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And there were Christine, Miriam, and Mick, arising pretty much fully formed in my imagination. Now available in paperback, Kate Christensen’s most recent novel, The Last Cruise, navigates the choppy waters of love and danger. The 1950s ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage—a retro cruise from Long Beach to Hawaii and back—before heading to the scrapyard.

Just a month later, in February 2020, the cruise ship accounted for half of the coronavirus cases on the planet, and the lives of hundreds of its passengers remained in limbo. With rapidly increasing COVID cases onboard, the ship attracted the attention of media from around the world. Using intimate footage recorded by passengers and crew, The Last Cruise is a first-person account of the nightmare that transpired aboard the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship, which set sail from Japan on the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So there’s your subtext, a story that would play out to the current day, when “essential workers” still risk themselves to pay the bills, and others stay home, content to get their groceries and takeout delivered to their front doors. None of this is to say that people like the Jorgensens are disempathetic, selfish people, but they represent a piece of a larger systemic problem. And Olson isn’t saying that only the working class suffers, just that they tend to suffer more (a truth that’s been present for centuries, to be honest). We see some American passengers test positive and being separated from loved ones, and while we know better now about how such a situation might play out, the uncertainty was quite distressing a year ago. The Last Cruise documents the experiences of people on board the now-infamous Diamond Princess cruise ship, where an uncontained COVID-19 outbreak at the start of the pandemic became a global spectacle and a faraway symbol of the new virus and its potential to upend any sense of normalcy.