The Tribe

The Tribe is that rare breed of film so masterful in execution it requires watching once, yet so devastating you may never be able to stomach seeing it again.

Sans dialogue or translation, each interaction effectively becomes a puzzle to be solved, and Slaboshpytskiy is brilliant at using ambiguity to heighten rather than dull the viewer’s perceptions. Even when the meaning of a particular exchange eludes us, a greater sense of narrative comprehension begins to take hold.

The use of sign language, deafness and silence itself adds several heady new ingredients to the base material, alchemically creating something rich, strange and very original.

If there’s anything worth extrapolating from The Tribe, it isn’t the deaf experience so much as recognizing our own tendencies to conform to certain unspoken laws. The more insular a society, the more severe the consequences of rebellion.

One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.

It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.

The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.

The Tribe is fresh-loving madness. I'll love the Tribe as long you love it too. Otherwise, we're not equal at all. The Tribe is the best way to waste time and never asking for it back again.

A feature film with no traditional dialogue or subtitles might be a technical and artistic feat, but it is still a film that is missing a critical component. The lack of that component all but demands compensation in another area of the film. In this case, that area would have to be story, and the story here simply doesn’t work. Feeling like an acting class was challenged to make a student film with no dialogue, The Tribe, in less than two hours, went from my Most Anticipated Film to my Biggest Disappointment of 2015.

The idea of a film set among deaf and seriously wayward schoolkids, whose sign language communication remains unsubtitled throughout, is a good one. And there are moments where this wordless drama, studded with some unflinching cruelty, hovers frustratingly close to it's promise. But alas The Tribe is a textbook example of a fledgling auteur grasping for greatness on terms that expose him as a pretentious, exploitative hack. Aping Larry Clark, Michael Haneke, and plenty others besides, Miroslav Slaboskpitsky's debut feature is a determinedly cold, bleak picture intent on defying good taste, daring stuffy critics and square viewers alike to dismiss it; but it's provocations, finally, have nothing to say except "I am the new wunderkind of arthouse sadomasochism! Bask in the chilly glow of my real-time pacing, detached compositions, and blunt depictions of sex and suffering!" Bold, for sure, but shallow and nasty with it.

Communication of thought distinguishes man from animal. In the twisted lord of the flies - Tribe - the audience is forced to interpret the actions of a pack of thieving survivors. It’s like watching the lion's cage at a zoo. And a facination with the sounds of silence dissolves into a tiresome experience after two hours - even though there are images worth a thousand words. Eastern Boys - another European film exploring similar territory- is far more effective.