‘The Tribe’ Is The Most Shocking and Original Movie You Didn’t See Last Year

There are few films you’ll find with as many barriers to entry as director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe. The first announces itself right at the title card: “This film is in sign language. There are no translations, no subtitles, no voiceover.” You’re on your own, is basically what that is saying. And so you’re placed into this film, as a teenage boy arrives at a school for the deaf for the first time and must navigate the school’s social waters. Those waters are cold, choppy, and dangerous.

When The Tribe premiered at the Cannes Film Festival way back in 2014, the film was praised for its unique presentation. The unmoored displacement the viewer feels as they’re left to keep up with the silence, the long takes (the scenes linger, often in a static take, long past the point of discomfort), and the sign language is significant. It’s up to the viewer to keep up, look for context clues, read body language, and interpret the events as well as they can. The story starts to reveal itself, as the newcomer boy finds himself involved with a clique of boys that operates more like a gang. They steal, they physically assault other students, they pimp out their female classmates at truck stops. It’s bad news. The school itself presents more like a prison barracks than a school at times, and the profound silence everywhere makes things feel even more desolate.

It’s that bleakness that provides the next barrier to entry. This film is GRIM. If you’re watching this story, you better be in it for the filmmaking, because as thrilling as that is — and it is undeniably electric to watch a film being told in a way that is wholly original compared to everything else that’s out there — the storytelling just doesn’t let up. It’s not just the sound, either. The silence pairs with the long takes, which then pairs with the deliberate camera movement, and with all those elements combined, that’s when Slaboshpitsky introduces his toughest material. A brutal attack by the boys on a train. Repeated, heightened acts of bullying. An awkward sexual encounter. An abortion scene that’s among the most harrowing things you’re likely to see in a film ever. And then a climax that manages to be even harder to watch than those earlier scenes.

There’s a reason that films as difficult to ease into as The Tribe is become favorites with cinephiles and critic types, and it’s not (just) the snobby pleasure of latching onto something that will prove to be too difficult or off-putting for average audiences. Slaboshpitsky’s film is most reminiscent of the directorial style of a Michael Haneke (Funny Games; Amour; Caché), another director who will often utilize silence, long takes, and jarring scenes of sex and violence to draw his audiences in and shock them into a reaction. These kinds of movies reward a kind of patience and attention in audience members. It takes a while to acclimate to the world of The Tribe, to surrender to the fact that you’re not getting a translation but rather a general, emotional sense of where the story is going. After you get used to it, the silence stops being a barrier and starts being an integral part of the story. It’s unsettling; it’s hypnotic; it’s dangerous. Sound is a warning and a defense mechanism that isn’t available to these characters. As The Tribe lurches towards its conclusion — an ending that beats anything I saw in 2015 for sheer cinematic impact —that silence gets weaponized. It’s difficult and unsettling but it’s also remarkable.

You can purchase The Tribe to stream on Amazon Video. (It’s also available on BluRay and DVD.)