Critics reviews

The Tribe is ultimately a stunt, as the characters often anonymously blend into the carefully planned tableaus, suggesting that Slaboshpitsky views them as ants for his bleak sensory deprivation project. There isn't much of a sense that the filmmaker is actually interested in the lives of the deaf, other than as pretenses for formal experimentation. But the film is powerfully cathartic, allowing human bodies to assume the figurative stage with a prominence that's rare in cinema.

One might begin by saying that deafness is likely not a source of "anxious confusion" to Deaf people; one might then proceed to say that the film's construction is so expert it amounts to a grand optimism and a solace. It contains no verbal language of the kind spoken by most people, but its formallanguage — not ISL, not any form of represented dialogue but its craftsmanship — is so powerful and complex as to re-emphasize the place of art — in this case, filmic art — alongside violence and politics as a third means of processing and shaping collective life.

This is the major quality of the film's formal innovation: its ability to produce monumental images and gestural performances that cannot leave the audience indifferent.

Here, wordless communication is miraculous one moment, sorely inadequate the next, just as hearing impairment itself is by turns insulating and imperiling. And anytime any of Slaboshpitsky's hapless marionettes grasps something resembling hope, the others seem reflexively to yank it away.

Slaboshpitsky uses ingenious strategies to draw the audience into the characters' world while respecting fundamental differences between the deaf and the hearing. The film, his feature debut, is never less than tantalizing, bringing us close enough to the subjects to inspire fascination but not close enough to establish thorough understanding. For hearing viewers, Slaboshpitsky approximates the experience of being deaf, and in that regard the film is a valuable provocation.

The debut film of the year so far is an astonishing coup de cinema from the Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy, who demonstrates a command of form and staging to leave one fittingly speechless. For all its deprivations (dialogue, subtitles, humanity), this cold, pitiless immersion in the life and crimes of a Kiev boarding school for deaf teenagers is simply staggering in its narrative momentum and emotional expressiveness.

The movie is leisurely as well as graphic in its representation of sex and violence and, predicated on long takes, is visceral in a wholly unexpected way.

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe signals an achievement of cinema in the purest sense of the word: unfolding entirely in sign language, the movie dispenses with subtitles, but the strength of its visual storytelling renders the spoken word completely unnecessary.

Slaboshpitsky guides this tale from mischief to tragedy the way one might drive a hearse. But you are in the presence of an artist who has complete control of his material in the fatless, waste-free style that Michael Haneke works. The final sequence is an appalling rush. I left the theater and had no idea which direction to walk. I was knocked out, in the way that a work of art can leave you knock-kneed, but also in the sense of being powerfully morally disoriented and dismayed.

We can't help but feel at times that we are intruders in this world. But that's not what makes The Tribe so confrontational. It's that the film shows us these otherwise vulnerable kids, then plunges us headlong into the depravity of this moral universe. It toys with our pity, then it toys with our outrage, then it toys with our identification. Before we know it, we've been sucked into its wicked, all-too-human drama.

What at first feels like an undertaking—figuring out what's going on without the luxury of words—becomes something much grander, and no less than a complete reimagining of the way an audience can and should approach its art. There are sequences contained within that are as spellbindingly horrific as anything in Gaspar Noé's shock masterpiece Irreversible.

The swooping shots and the way the lack of dialogue amplifies ambient sounds are stunning. Story-wise, "The Tribe" is yet another art-film wallow in cruelty, not nearly as unique as its looks and its world.