Tribe Review: Somebody Please Take the Videotapes

Devin Adams is a retired university lecturer who picks up video processing as a hobby and immediately gets handed some obviously cursed videotapes. He does not burn them. He investigates. This is the problem with Tribe, and also the entire plot.

Written and directed by Dan Asma, co-owner of trailer marketing company Buddha Jones (Hereditary, Annihilation, It), this is his narrative feature debut, and he plays the lead himself. The film had a solid festival run, including a stop at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and the European premiere at Grimmfest 2025, before landing on UK digital May 25 via GrimmVision. The cosmic horror ideas are genuinely interesting. The protagonist is genuinely maddening. Both of those things are true at the same time and that tension is basically the whole movie.

Sir, That Container Is Obviously Cursed

Rather than the single-camera trudge that sinks most entries in the genre, Tribe stitches together body cam footage, drone footage, trail cams, and old VHS tapes into a fragmented timeline moving both backward and forward in time. As a structure it works, and it plays to Asma’s strengths as a trailer editor. He knows how to cut.

The trail cam sequences are where the film does its best work. Human-shaped figures at the edge of the frame, crawling on all fours through the brush the way nothing human should crawl. Something in disheveled clothing moving between cameras, destroying them methodically. A camera getting dragged inside the container, footage shredding into distortion.

This stuff is effective. I will not pretend otherwise. The Blair Witch Project built its mythology out of what the camera caught by accident. Tribe has the same instinct in these passages.

Then Devin walks into the container.

The cult members show up looking wrong in ways the film hasn’t explained yet and tell him very clearly to leave. He seems to consider it. A college even warns him of the dangers of investigating. He goes back in any way. The Resolution and Empty Man DNA is visible here, but those films understood that the protagonist’s compulsion had to feel almost supernatural. In Tribe, Devin mostly just seems like he never encountered the concept of a warning sign.

The Mythology Is Actually Doing Something

The lore underneath all the bad decisions is legitimately worth your time.

The Church of Heaven’s Light is a hyper-conservative religious offshoot whose proximity to the divine physically transforms its members. Sometimes into something you can still recognize. Sometimes not. The body horror implication here, that faith costs something written on your flesh whether you consented to it or not, is genuinely horrible in a way the film only half-commits to developing.

The deeper mythology runs on what others have called the Silurian Theory. Ancient beings that didn’t die with the great extinctions but went underground, traveling between dimensions through shadows. Charlie’s old videotapes contain his fragmented theories about alternate evolution. The codex Devin steals is full of coordinates. The text reads “Prepare for Heaven’s Light. You don’t need eyes to see your savior,” which is one of the better lines of cosmic dread the genre has produced in a while.

Taken together it builds a Lovecraftian framework in the structural sense, the kind where the real horror is understanding what the universe has always been. The Empty Man did something similar to great effect. Tribe has the same instinct but a fraction of the resources.

Verdict

Tribe is a film that keeps almost being great.

The editing is sharp, the trail cam sequences earn genuine dread, and the mythology is interesting enough that I spent time after the credits thinking about it, which is more than I can say for most found footage releases in recent memory. The Lovecraftian framework works. The cult body horror works. The idea that faith physically transforms you whether you chose it or not is a genuinely unsettling concept that a better-resourced version of this film could do real damage with.

What doesn’t work often enough is Devin, and the effects ceiling, and a final act that arrives slightly breathless. The film almost becomes something genuinely special a few times before pulling back to something that is merely watchable.

Watch it for the trail cam sequences. Watch it for the mythology, which is doing Lovecraftian work on a nothing budget. Accept the exasperation as part of the experience.

Tribe is a genuinely ambitious debut. Devin Adams should not be allowed near shipping containers.