Where Does Buzzy TIFF Film ‘Victoria’ Rank Among the Best Single-Take Movies?

After taking the Berlin Film Festival by storm, Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria has come to the Toronto Film Festival, ready to wow audiences with its 138-minute single-take story of a young woman who gets caught up in a bank heist after a late night partying in Berlin. And before you even say it: yes, that’s how all nights in Berlin end up.

Here’s the thing: yes, it’s a stunt. Filming an entire film, especially one clocking in over two hours, in a single continuous take is a feat of look-at-me daring that is as much an end in itself than it is a means to tell a story. But Victoria tells a pretty exciting story just the same. The single take, a hand-held camera that goes from a strobe-heavy underground club to a rooftop gathering to a coffee shop after hours to a bank heist to a car chase to a shootout and on and on — there’s a real sense of trying to keep up with events that are unfolding out of control. It’s at times dreamy, at times funny, at times deeply harrowing and fateful. There’s a moment in the middle where you think for a second that morality won’t come into play and that the exhilaration of the moment can carry these characters through. It’s a naive, hopeful moment, but you’re right up there in it.

Of course, Victoria comes on the heels of Birdman with its trickery-assisted single-take aesthetic. Long tracking shots are all the rage right now, but there’s also more scrutiny on them, since the mere fact of an extended single take is no longer novelty enough to guarantee a good reception. So where does Victoria‘s achievement rank? We took a random sampling of this era’s most notable long takes.