The Tribe review – brutally grim
Set in an insular deaf community in Kyiv, Ukrainian writer/director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s highly praised debut feature is told entirely through unsubtitled sign language. His singularly unsentimental portrayal of the protagonists has an air of empowering authenticity. Yet the voyeuristic grimness of the world depicted in this “homage to silent film” offers a greater barrier than language ever could, forcing the audience to look away – a peculiarly perverse response to provoke given the film’s immersive achievements.
Arriving at a forbidding boarding school, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) falls in with a bullying gang who fight, steal, and pimp girls to local truckers under the watchful eye of a brutish woodwork teacher. Rising through the ranks, Sergey develops an illicit relationship with Anya (Yana Novikova), which threatens to unravel the machine-like operation of the “tribe”. With love comes destruction, a silent scream of anguish rising to a visual climax through a series of increasingly explicit “theatre of cruelty” set pieces.
Cinematographer and editor Valentyn Vasyanovych uses audacious extended takes to create a continuous visual environment in which the superb non-professional cast appear natural and convincing. Yet a whiff of Gaspar Noé-esque exploitation lingers around the most self-consciously confrontational sequences (a protracted back-street abortion, explosions of bloody violence) that is not dispelled by any underlying political allegory. While the absence of verbal language presents no barrier to engagement, scenes of almost unwatchable squalor offer a potentially insurmountable challenge.