7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Without dialogue, subtitles or voiceover, THE TRIBE recounts the experiences of Sergey, a teenager newly arrived at a boarding school for the deaf, who is immediately inducted into the student body's criminal hierarchy and introduced to its business of robbery, extortion and prostitution.
Starring: Grigoriy Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy, Alexander OsadchiyForeign | 100% |
Drama | 55% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Ukrainian: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Sign language; no spoken dialogue
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Digital copy
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The Tribe is a Ukrainian film, but you won't have to read a single subtitle, because the film has
no spoken dialogue. The characters are all hearing- and speech-impaired individuals who
communicate in sign language, which is not translated. Writer/director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
has said that he wanted to make a modern-day silent movie, and his debut feature takes the silent
aesthetic to an extreme that exceeds anything from Hollywood's classical era (or even a retro
creation like The Artist). The Tribe
deprives the viewer of any narrative scaffolding to tell you
who's who, where they are or what they are doing. You have to deduce what is transpiring on
screen from visual clues and specific actions. You have to pay attention.
The Tribe debuted at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it won multiple awards and critical
acclaim. It was widely expected to be the Ukraine's submission for that year's Oscars but was
supplanted by Oles Sanin's The Guide, in a decision so controversial that it led to reforms in the
country's selection procedure. According to the director's commentary on the new Blu-ray from
Drafthouse Films, the decision was the product of bribery. If that's true, it's an appropriate coda
to The Tribe's brutally frank depiction of an outlaw society.
The Tribe was shot primarily on Alexa, with an occasional scene captured on the Red Epic, which
is more portable. The credited cinematographer is Valentyn Vasyanovych, who also edited and
produced. Director Slaboshpytskiy says in his commentary that he would have preferred to shoot
on 35mm film, but The Tribe's many long, unbroken shots required digital capture. (I didn't
count, but IMDb states that the film contains just 34 shots, which sounds about right.)
Drafthouse's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray provides a sharply defined and detailed image that
allows the viewer to study both the people and their surroundings, which is essential given the
director's preference for static panoramic shots in which multiple actions play out across the
frame. Contrast and black levels are very good, which is important for the many night sequences.
The film's palette appears to be naturalistic, with a gamut of hues running from faded to richly
dark; The Tribe's entire spectrum can be seen in the copious graffiti appearing everywhere on the
crumbling buildings, providing a kind of indirect commentary on the action. The image is so
good that you can even make out the patterns of the parquet wooden floors in the school
corridors.
Drafthouse has mastered The Tribe with an average bitrate of 29.98 Mbps, and there were no
compression or other artifacts.
The Tribe's 5.1 soundtrack has obviously been mixed with care, and the Blu-ray's lossless DTS-HD MA encoding does it justice, but the
mix gives new meaning to the term "minimalist". In
addition to having no dialogue, the film has no score (and no source music either). All we hear
are the sounds of events onscreen—jackets being zipped, doors being opened and closed, a
crowd of "regular" people chattering indistinctly—and even those sounds are frequently muted
by Slaboshpytskiy's penchant for keeping the action at a distance in long shots. The surrounds
are an active presence, and their environmental ambiance becomes even more noticeable because
so little is competing with them from the front soundstage. Unseen cars passing on roads behind
the scene, water dripping from pipes that are just out of sight or the rhythmic clack and rumble of
train wheels claim much more attention when the viewer is searching for every scrap of
information to comprehend the scene.
The front isn't always quiet, however. Several key scenes are accompanied by intense and
sharply rendered effects that can't be described without revealing major plot turns.
With The Tribe, Drafthouse has added yet another worthy entry to its growing library of unique
films. Against the chorus of complaints that Hollywood has run out of new ideas,
Slaboshpytskiy's feature debut demonstrates that cinematic creativity continues to flourish. You
won't even have to read subtitles, although you may end up wishing they were there. Highly
recommended, with the caveat that The Tribe is not for those who are easily frustrated (or
squeamish).
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