Victoria

Sebastian Schipper's Victoria announces its ambition before a single frame of drama begins: this film unfolds in one continuous, unbroken take, one hundred and forty minutes shot in real time across the streets, clubs, and rooftops of Berlin as the sun comes up. It would be a curiosity if that were all it had going for it. It isn't. The technical feat matters here because it changes what kind of film Victoria is allowed to be — there is no cut to skip past discomfort, no way to reset the emotional temperature once it starts climbing.

Laia Costa plays the title character, a Spanish expatriate working an aimless night shift at a Berlin café, who falls in with four local men after a chance encounter outside a club. What begins as a loose, almost documentary hangout pivots, without any visible seam, into something far more dangerous. The film's back half asks Victoria, and by extension the audience, to keep pace with decisions made in seconds that will not be undone.

What holds it together is not the gimmick but Costa's performance, which has to carry every beat of tonal whiplash without the safety net every other film enjoys. By the time Victoria is running through empty streets in the film's final minutes, camera and character have become the same breathless thing — and the effect is less like watching a movie than being told, quietly and urgently, to keep up.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial