Interesting Films That Were Shot In One Take

“The Message” (2024), dir. Joel Haver

Joel Haver is not a professional film director, but a YouTuber with two million subscribers, whose trademark is to take on all kinds of challenges related to filming movies that resemble traditional cinema as much as possible (rather than, say, vlogs and let’s plays). In 2024, he successfully shot twelve feature films in twelve months, including repeating his annual mass performance of filming directly during the Oscar awards ceremony.

Hayver’s resulting 50-minute single-shot comedy, The Message, looks much better than one might expect from such a description: it is amateur cinema at its best — lively, funny, photogenic.

The morning after a party in a house rented for a day, several young men are wondering what to do about a very embarrassing drunken text message that one of them sent to his ex earlier.

Shooting in one take made the task easier for the author and the actors (an underrated aspect of this technique, which I also know firsthand: if no one says “cut,” even amateur filmmakers don’t lose their concentration), but it hardly brings anything new to the genre (a model of Hollywood comedies of the 2000s).

And yet this YouTuber commands more respect than many film professionals. Who knows what he will do next — the boundaries of the industry are more fluid than ever.

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Medusa Deluxe (2022), dir. Thomas Hardiman

Someone should have made this film much earlier: Medusa Deluxe is a single-shot, self-contained detective story that adds the unity of time (the closing of a hairdressing competition) to the unity of space (dressing rooms connected by endless corridors) inherent in the genre. It’s a million-dollar idea, but the end result is more like an awkward smile with which you thank the hairdresser who gave you a haircut that only vaguely resembles the model’s photo.

In other words, compared to classic examples of the genre, there is no need to seriously worry about who the killer is, but you won’t regret watching this mannerist film.

The Quiet House (2011), dir. Chris Kentis, Laura Lou

In theory, a horror film consisting of a single hour-and-a-half-long scene, where the heroine creeps in terror through a creaky haunted house, should be the embodiment of pure suspense. In practice, however, The Quiet House, starring Elizabeth Olsen, has a calming effect on the viewer: all the whispering, screaming, and even rhythmic screams are like an extreme ASMR session. This film is a Hollywood remake of a homemade Uruguayan original, and it must be said that among studio projects, it would be difficult to find another example that is so rough, awkward, and touchingly vague (the denouement, where the heroine, traumatized by abuse, finds herself haunted by her own ghost, is literally impossible to understand). In short, what we have here is a film that defies all production and audience logic, a treat for cinephiles who know a thing or two about genre perversions.

Soft and Quiet (2022), dir. Beth de Araujo

A shamelessly exploitative film from Blumhouse about a violent neo-Nazi cell consisting of suburban moms who voted for Trump. Their politically charged dialogues, copied from Twitter (from “they want to take away our femininity” to “my grandfather was a respected clan member”), it would be hard to believe, even if someone said it was raw footage from a surveillance camera, and as a Hollywood production, it looks like a comedy.