Metacritic reviews

The actions and events are naked to our eyes, not couched in reasons and justifications, not softened by explanations, by words.

Sans dialogue or translation, each interaction effectively becomes a puzzle to be solved, and Slaboshpytskiy is brilliant at using ambiguity to heighten rather than dull the viewer’s perceptions. Even when the meaning of a particular exchange eludes us, a greater sense of narrative comprehension begins to take hold.

Slaboshpitsky's The Tribe is gripping, tour de force cinema from its opening jab, and from there it continually forces you against the ropes before delivering a knockout punch with a gut-wrenching conclusion destined to leave audiences stunned.

This is brutally strong filmmaking, aggressive and alive and impeccably accomplished.

From one mesmerizing scene to the next, The Tribe never loses its flow. Even its harshest moments are defined by vibrant motion.

The use of sign language, deafness and silence itself adds several heady new ingredients to the base material, alchemically creating something rich, strange and very original.

Original, engrossing and extremely confrontational, The Tribe treads the dark path between misery porn and masterpiece.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words.

The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.