The Bear didn’t just drop a one-er in their series to create a splash. No, they gave us a full, 18-minute-long complete one-shot episode. The series, about a volatile chef (Jeremy Allen White) returning to his hometown to run his late brother’s restaurant, understands that a kitchen is like a battlefield. It’s a sensory overload of stress, with any number of people at the centre trying to keep afloat. In that way, a single-shot episode feels fitting, especially when they’re used so effectively in scenes of warfare. The never-ending shot only helps build up the mounting pressure of a busy restaurant at lunchtime, whipping our nerves into a bundled frenzy in real-time as the promise of some respite feels interminably long. The episode is a feat of technique, skill and choreography.
1. The Shining (1980)
You can’t talk about one-shot sequences without mentioning the most unsettling of them all, from Stanely Kubrick’s The Shining. As a whole, the film is a powder keg of unease, a bubbling pot of tension waiting to blow but never, even in its bigger moments, fully bursting. As we gear up to the final moments of explosiveness from Jack Nicholson’s Jack, we’re cued up with a series of ghostly set pieces. One of the more famous is Danny (Daniel Lloyd) riding his tricycle through the iconically carpeted floors of the Overlook Hotel. The child weaves his big wheel through the resort’s winding corridor, and if it weren’t for the choreography needed to execute a one-shot, you could easily believe he had just been told to go wherever he wants. His speedy journey is halted, however, by happening across door 237, the room of a haunted woman. The scene is short but impactful. Danny is young and innocent, but even he can’t be spared from the horrors lurking in the corridors of his weird new home. ‘The Studio’
This story originally appeared in British GQ.