Films shot in one take

Birdman (2014), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Shooting an entire feature film without any cuts is an extremely cinematic technique that makes you watch almost any spectacle with your eyes wide open.

But there are exceptions to this rule. Birdman is an unbearable anti-film that makes both the audience and the characters suffer from suffocation and claustrophobia. At the same time, its Oscar triumph is easy to explain: this cynical, unpleasant film exploits creative neuroses and the fear of aging, taking middle-aged male film academy members hostage to its emotions. I would advise everyone else to run away from this film while they still have the chance.

Beyond Two Endless Minutes (2020)

The wonderful Japanese comedy film Zombie in One Shot! showed, with gentle irony, amateur filmmakers who, thanks to their strong friendship and ingenuity, pulled off a small zombie horror film without any editing, with only a few funny technical flaws.

The director of the sci-fi comedy Beyond Two Endless Minutes watched this national box office hit and decided to do something similar—but not a meta-film about the hardships of film production, but a non-ironic genre miniature shot in one take, just like the heroes of the comedy. The resulting frenzied farce about a time machine on TV, silly bandits, and a sea of friendly smiles is, as one might expect, a completely meaningless spectacle. This is a film that was clearly a thousand times more fun to make than to watch.

Well, in a sense, the amateur filmmakers drew the right conclusions after watching Zombie in One Shot!

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The Body Remembers When the World Fell Apart (2019)

The social drama “The Body Remembers When the World Fell Apart” about a chance encounter between two suffering women (a victim of domestic violence and a conscientious sociophobe) insists on its status as an anti-attraction throughout the entire film. The uninterrupted 90-minute take (film camera plus computer graphics) includes long dialogues in a shelter and poorly lit taxi rides. But all this does not make the picture any less artificially constructed: the didactic nature of the narrative and the sheer number of topical “-isms” raised (colonialism, feminism, lucism, codependent masochism) make this long take resemble not a raw and vibrant slice of life, but a lengthy lecture with a lot of hot air.

The Possessed (2024)

The Possessed is undoubtedly an impressively shot zombie horror film (in one take, without hidden cuts — if we are to believe the director), but it is completely empty and derivative in terms of content.

By the standards of the “new French extreme,” the violence is not shocking at all, and against the backdrop of American classics of the genre, the social metaphors are not apparent (the best that enthusiastic critics can offer is a commentary on teenage drug addiction). In short, this is one of those rare cases where a film can truly be accused of using flashy techniques just for the sake of it.