Like a crustless pizza as big as my ego, there is so much good here I don't know where to start.

The most startling fact about this movie is that it's made entirely by deaf teens in Ukrainian sign language with no subtitles or translation of any kind. This puts an incredible amount pressure on the filmmaker to deliver a coherent story when the audience cannot understand a word from the actors. Hell, even silent movies had the luxury of cards to explain the story, whereas The Tribe eschews all of that to rely solely on visual cues.

Not only is the technical telling of the story fascinating, but the story itself is enthralling. The passion of a newcomer to the deaf boarding school for a classmate starts off as an ember and is fanned into a conflagration -- it's reminiscent in intensity and sincerity to Splendor in the Grass.

As if that weren't enough, The Tribe is able to avoid every single last cliché about deaf teens. Rather than a group of scrappy youth who learn to band together to overcome adversity and save their school / town / prom, the youths here gang up to be the adversity.

Through drug dealing, pimping, prostitution, racketeering... they terrorize other students in the school and one another by smashing every 'poor handicapped child' stereotype like a bottle of cheap beer on the crumbling walls of convention.

And like that broken beer bottle, The Tribe is cutting edge on many levels, and left its permanent mark on me.

"Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s study of teenage tribalism and the brutal adherence to a gangland-style hierarchy is a grimy, gripping, unrelenting vision..."

Read the full review here: http://screen-space.squarespace.com/reviews/2015/6/27/the-critics-capsule-revelation-2015-volume-1.html