Victoria (2015)

Sebastian Schipper's Victoria arrives with a gimmick so audacious it threatens to swallow the film whole: 138 minutes, one continuous take, shot in Kreuzberg and Mitte between 4:30 and 7:00 in the morning with a twelve-page script and a cast largely improvising. The result is a kinetic descent from club to rooftop to cafe to bank to hotel, and the camera never blinks. We have seen many technical marvels. Few of them also manage to be a decent thriller. This one does, which is its own quiet rebuke to the era of the assembly-line spectacle.

The social content is thinner than a casual viewer might expect, and this works in the film's favor. Victoria is a Spanish woman adrift in Berlin, working a cafe job for meager wages, and she ends up behind the wheel of a getaway car because a stranger asked nicely and she had nothing else to do at five in the morning. She is decisive, competent, and drives the plot with her own hands. The film never stops to inform us that this is significant. Her companions are marginal young men, one of them Turkish-German, and their criminal errand is a debt owed to a gangster named Andi, not a manifesto about the inequities of late capitalism. Kreuzberg simply looks like Kreuzberg. The movie does not congratulate itself for noticing.

We are left with a taut, propulsive piece of genre filmmaking that shows instead of tells, moralizes about nothing, and ends with a woman walking down a street holding a bag of money and an uncertain future. There is no sermon, no checklist, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain what we should feel. It is a relic from a time when a thriller could simply be a thriller. We found the experience bracing, and slightly melancholy, like finding a good meal in an airport.