Berlin, 5:42 am. Victoria, a young, newly arrived Spanish woman in Germany, comes out of a club and meets a group of excited young men. Motivated by their humor and party atmosphere, she decides to follow them into the night. And so Victoria gets sucked into a dangerous story with dramatic consequences…

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Beware of film festival phenomena: this could well be the moral of this movie, which won the Grand Prix in Beaune and the Silver Bear in Berlin, where jury president Darren Aronofsky announced this film would astonish the world. Hyped on the strength of its one-take shot that lasts 2:15, Victoria by Sebastian Schipper is colorless and stereotypical, a passionless Run Lola, Run (a cool German movie that by contrast lived up to its reputation), with little imagination or charm that seems to spend all its energy in the one take instead of anywhere else. Beyond the futile attempt at magic through a perpetual camera shot, what’s left is boring due to flat characters and a story that starts off hollow and turns out incredibly dull.