6. The Tribe
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unsubtitled Ukrainian sign-language drama is still one of the most singularly unsettling films seen in years. Unfolding with oftentimes cruel remove from the deaf teenagers who are its protagonists, it’s a film whose political and social subtexts are writ large, as though to make up for the absence of spoken dialogue. The breathtaking formalist daring of the execution is one thing, but the actual story Slaboshpytskiy tells is another level again, in its unsentimental evisceration of institutionalization and its despairing outlook on human nature in the absence of codified rules of conduct. “The Tribe” is a surreal, social-realist, arthouse horror: truly frightening and deeply, to-the-bone uncanny.