20 Movies That Took HUGE Risks (And NAILED It)

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's 2014 crime drama The Tribe is centered around a boarding school for deaf teenage students, and beyond the film being performed by its deaf ensemble cast entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language, the film was also released without any subtitles at all.

While audiences watching films in a language they don't understand naturally expect subs, in this case Slaboshpytskiy made the artistic choice to withhold them, forcing the non-signing audience to observe body language, facial expressions, and the particulars of the hand signals themselves to make sense of what's happening.

Much as it might sound like a gimmick destined to turn many off, it's a fascinating and surprisingly effective experiment which demonstrates just how much can be intuited from visuals without the aid of spoken dialogue or subtitles.

And while it could so easily have gone horribly wrong in lesser hands, in this case it helps an already unique film stand out even more.