Review // The Tribe

If someone told you there’s a new silent film in theatres that you should check out, chances are your first thought would be something akin to Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a merry romp where character’s mug to the camera and handy little title cards pop up whenever they mouth their dialogue. Well if that’s what you think going into The Tribe you’re in for a surprise. The film, from rookie Ukranian director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, takes place at a boarding school for the deaf and features reams of dialogue. The only problem is that all that dialogue is in Ukranian Sign Language, and we’re not given subtitles.

Okay, you’re thinking, it could still be cute. No, The Tribe is far from cute. In fact it features some of the most disturbing and squirm-worthy depictions of on-screen violence we’ve seen in quite a while. Despite the novelty of it’s setting, this is a film about a gang of criminals. Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), our protagonist, steps out of a tunnel and in to a rundown industrial school building. He’s slow-moving, deliberate and perhaps a bit daft, but he’s also strong, which he proves when challenged to a fight on his first day by the blond gang leader (Yaroslav Biletskiy). Having proved his mettle, Sergey is adopted into the gang of teenage boys who – with the help of the shop teacher and a high ranking school official – run a number of criminal enterprises, most notably the pimping of two girls Anna (Yana Novikova) and Svetka (Rosa Babiy), to the local population of truckers.

After the regular pimp is killed in a freak accident (related to his inability to hear), Sergey takes over his post and accompanies the girls on their nightly routine of knocking on truck windows and organizing sexual exchanges via paper and pen. However when he starts to develop feelings for Anna (as teenagers are wont to do) Sergey tries to stop her from her nightly pursuits, angering both the gang members as well as Anna…who really doesn’t seem to mind her job.

All of this builds to acts of extreme violence made exponentially more unnerving by the fact that we can’t understand anything anyone is saying. While ambient noise remains, the extent of human sounds are footsteps, heavy breathes and the slapping of hands. The experience is both unsettling and utterly fascinating. An early scene of a student speaking out in class provides an eye opening example of how different, yet similar, this school experience is to our own. Later, when we are forced to watch a drawn out abortion sequence in a dirty apartment washroom, the silence has become an oppressive force, overwhelming and stifling to the point of physical discomfort.

Adding to this feeling is the cinematography from Valentin Vasyanovych. Slow pans and long, unbroken takes regularly sit us in a room for minutes at a time, relying on the body language of the actors to tell the story. It’s a gutsy stylistic choice, especially considering the film is cast largely with amateurs, and it doesn’t always pay off (scenes of the school official recounting his vacation or waiting in line at the passport office get a little dull) but when it does it provides some of the more haunting visuals of the year.

Overall The Tribe is like a long, slow gut punch. It makes you wonder what the experience is like for someone who actually speaks Ukranian Sign Language. Is all the violence warranted? Are these actually reasonable people caught up in a bad situation? I don’t know if I want to know. Without a translation the film is a haunting, almost otherworldly experience. When the lights in the theatre came up, it felt like I was waking from a nightmare. I liked it.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.