Despite what it must sometimes look like, I don’t pick films to watch based on whether or not they’re from a country I haven’t covered yet. This one popped up on the best films of 2014 lists of multiple critics and yes, not only is it the first Ukrainian film I’ve ever watched and it’s also the first film I’ve watched that is entirely in sign language. This means that there isn’t one single line of spoken dialogue, plus as a deliberate decision by the film makers there are no subtitles or translations of any kind as well.

The film opens with a boy who arrives as a new student at a boarding school for the deaf. Perhaps because this is in Ukraine, the conditions there are miserable and the boy is bullied right from the onset. The students, consisting of both boys and girls in the same dormitory, seem to have little adult supervision and are mostly left to their own devices. When night falls, they even roam the streets committing crimes and we slowly learn that the deaf students are effectively organized like a gang with its own distinct hierarchy. After proving himself, the new boy finds his place within the group easily enough but it’s not much of a spoiler to say that this isn’t a story that ends well for anyone.

With no spoken dialogue at all, we never even find out the names of any of the characters and it feels like we only observe them at a remove. At the same time, because we’re forced to rely only on visual cues, the film forces us to be hyper-aware of it. It’s a fascinating experience to be conscious of how much can be communicated through body language alone. We may not understand sign language but we can’t still tell the emotional states of the characters by how vigorously they move their hands and it’s eerie how they can articulate each hand movement as a distinct motion in the exact same way that we can enunciate each spoken syllable clearly for dramatic emphasis. For this reason alone, watching The Tribe is a cinematic experience like no other and its director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy deserves praise for having the creativity to come up with it.

Unfortunately I’m quite unhappy with the story that he chooses to tell with this school of deaf students. The criminality of the students is so extreme that it prompts one to wonder why the police aren’t doing anything about it. Then there’s the inescapable fact that their being criminals so dominates the narrative that their being deaf feels like almost an irrelevant detail. I understand that the director wanted the audience to see the characters as just people and not specifically deaf people but their experiences are so far beyond what is normal that they never seem quite real to me. One reviewer noted that their being deaf doesn’t preclude them from having the potential for either good or evil but none of the characters here seem to have any redeeming qualities that I can notice. The society they live in feels so depressing as to be almost post-apocalyptic, an impression reinforced by the dilapidated state of their surroundings.

I did appreciate some of the details that felt authentic to me, such as the girls being prostituted to long distance truckers who spend the night parked alongside the roads, and wanting to get out of Ukraine to have a better life in the west. I would loved to see more such facets of ordinary life in the country even if it has to be focused more on the darker aspects of society for the sake of extra dramatic power. But I strongly feel that this film goes overboard in its eagerness to shock the viewer, especially with an ending that is a bit lazy and isn’t very interesting. I even question the inclusion of at least one overly graphical sex scene that add little insight to the characters involved and may be present only for titillation purposes.

I still found this to be well worth watching because of how novel it feels to have everything in sign language. I’m also intrigued that those who can understand Ukrainian sign language may well have a very different perception of this film. But I also consider it the work of a director who is as yet immature as it lacks the complexity to be a truly good film.