The Tribe will fuck you up, take Rachel Fox’s word for it.

“It reminded me in some ways of the experience I had as a teenager watching Kids for the first time, where I didn’t know quite what I was watching and I wondered if it was a documentary,” said the programmer, who brings the film to this year’s Rio Grind Film Festival, running at the Rio Theatre next Thursday to Sunday (October 23 to 26).

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s uncompromising feature debut is set inside a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf seized by a brutal criminal hierarchy. All the dialogue is in sign language, sans subtitles.

“It asks a lot of the viewer,” continued Fox, in a call to the Straight. “But in a way you become more invested because of how you have to watch it. And what unfolds is so violent, and it goes to a place you don’t expect, but also, it’s hauntingly quiet—like reality. That’s what does it.”

Fox added that while The Tribe also reminded her of the work of Michael Haneke—”It’d be hard for me to talk to anyone about this film who didn’t like it, because I think I’d respect them less,” she said—the rest of the Rio Grind isn’t quite so challenging. But it is appropriately grindy, with a schedule that also includes the Vancouver premiere of The ABCs of Death 2, Matthew Gray Gubler hamming it up to hilarious effect in Suburban Gothic, Sion Sono’s mental Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, These Final Hours, Spring, and the highly touted doc Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

More information is at www.riotheatre.ca/.