Victoria, 2015 - ★★★★★

You can also find this review on Letterboxd

Probably the best German movie I've ever seen.

First of all for all English speaking people out there: most of the movie is in English. The story is about a spanish girl called Victoria who just recently moved to Germany so her german is not that good.
The movie starts with Victoria dancing in a disco, getting a schnaps and then leaving the bar. Outside she meets 4 guys: Sonne, Blinker, Boxer and Fuss. They want to show her Berlin and she joins them.

There is some more stuff happening that I don't want to spoil for you. I heard this is marketed as an action movie which it is not. It has some action elements, but that's a rather small part.

The characters are great and I kind of wished I could hang out with them myself.

Now to the special part: this 140 minutes long movie is entirely shot in one ... shot. No cuts at all, the camera starts on her and never cuts at all. And it's not like Birdman where they had long takes but it was not really just one shot. It simply is all done in one take.
For that reason most of the scenes where improvised which is probably the reason the characters feel so real. In one scene, Sonne sais Hotel instead of Café and then starts laughing about that mistake. On the one hand this is probably how the character would react but I'm pretty sure it's also the genuine reaction of the actor.

The story takes a turn somewhere in the middle and takes the movie in a different direction that is even more interesting and so exciting. You start feeling for the characters, feeling with them, even though not everything they do is good and nice.

What I thought was interesting is that while in Birdman you are always kind of remembering that it looks like a one shot in Victoria I forgot about it all the time because of the acting, the story, the charactery and also the camera. When I think back about this movie I remember certain shots where the camera was used greatly, never feeling annoying, never feeling out of place.

All in all I really love this movie and I'm thinking about watching it a second time. Really happy that something like this got made in Germany. I give it 5 ouf of 5 stars and a fat like. Everyone should see this.