The Tribe Is One of the Most Disturbing Movies on Netflix—And It’s Nearly Silent
We’re so used to sound in cinema that we don’t always think about how it’s used to modulate our experience, how the most violent action can be turned comic by a pop music soundtrack, or how David Lynch can make a cup of coffee terrifying with an ominous hum. This is what makes watching The Tribe, the 2014 debut by Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, such a shocking and mesmerizing experience. The movie follows a teenage boy who falls into a violent criminal ring at a Ukrainian school for the deaf. And everything is silent. The movie removes the comfort of music and words to leave the viewer entirely at the mercy of the image.
The Tribe—which Slaboshpytskiy has called his “homage to silent movies”—is not entirely without sound. While there is no music and no spoken words, you can still hear the rev of a car’s engine or the scrape of a chair across a concrete floor. Even if you’ve seen plenty of old silent movies, The Tribe is a unique movie-watching experience. Silent movies are typically placed with a soundtrack, and even if the dialogue is not recorded it is relayed on title cards. The Tribe provides no music, and no words unless you speak Ukrainian Sign Language. The subtitles option will merely get you the occasional “[bird chirping]” and “[door creaks]” notes.
The movie opens with a teenage boy named Sergey (although names aren’t revealed until the credits) finding his way to a boarding school for the deaf in the Ukraine. Like any other school, this one has its hierarchies and pitfalls. The losers who eat lunch alone, and the cool kids who enforce the social order. At this school, those cool kids run a criminal gang that assault and rob strangers, and prostitute two of the female classmates at a local truck stop. While they sign instead of speak, the gang isn’t any different than what you’d find at a troubled and underfunded school for the non-deaf, and that’s the point. This is a movie with a grim view on humanity and modern society.
The plot itself is somewhat expected, even cliché. Sergey joins the gang and begins committing increasingly immoral acts. Soon he falls in love with one of the girls, Anya. Things come to a head. The results are dark, disturbing, and disastrous.
But what makes The Tribe stand-out is the experience. Not only is the film mostly silent, but the director leans into the power of the images by filming in a series of long tracking shots that refuse to cut away. (A long scene involving an illegal abortion will test every viewer’s desire to look away and cover their ears). Without subtitles, it’s a movie that truly shows the language of body language. The Tribe can be a challenging film to get through, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
