Tribe (2025) Review: HP Lovecraft Film Festival Cinemax

Intensity: 🩸 🩸 on 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Written and directed by Dan Asma

Curiosity is a dangerous thing. In the cosmic horror, the exploration of truths can lead to the worse fate that death, and yet people will always seek to know things that they should really leave alone. In TribeA man lost in badlands distant from the south of Sierras undergoes a horrible physical transformation. He hopes that certain media training sessions he found in his Airstream trailer will tell him why he is in the situation in which he is. His salvation can take the form of his own images found, but that can also predict his own destiny.

Dan Asma took a most curious path to become a director. He is a co -owner of Buddha Jones: a theatrical film marketing agency. Asma has produced many large trailers of recent memory, especially Hereditary, Dunkirk, Wonder Woman, Annihilation, It and The Conjuring. He also produced some interesting horror titles: the acrophobic Autumn (One of my favorite films of 2023) and the original Spirit of the body of the mindBut it was his first narrative direction. He chose an excellent format for his beginnings.

The characteristics of the images found can live and die by assembly. When we consider what a trailer director does, it is essentially an editing exercise, taking parts of the work of another director and making convincing advertising. Tribe is a story assembled from video elements found. As is necessary for a film like this one to succeed, the likelihood is essential and it closes it. Production is honest. The key to the credibility of the story is that he presented himself as a web documentary maker in Crypto-Chasse in pursuit of mysteries who should have been left alone.

The casting of the tribe:

• Dan Asma (not credited) plays Devon Adams, a retirement professor for visual studies at the University of Southern California (although he carries a lot of equipment from the University of Oregon). He is looking for answers to the reason why one of his best friends mysteriously committed suicide.
• Keaton Asma plays Charlie Anchor, Devon’s best friend since the early 90s. Charlie belonged to the light of the heaven church, potentially a cult. As a child, he was found wandering alone in the desert. We see Charlie in old media images.
• Nicole Jones embodies Kate, the ex-wife of Devin, who recently discovered new information which suggests disturbing circumstances behind the disappearance of Charlie. Devon consults Nicole on her conclusions because she also knew Charlie.
• Tyona Bowman embodies Archer, one of the former students of Adam who assists him at a distance in research in his explorations.

A synopsis of Tribe

Professor Adams was struck by a disfiguring disease. Adams is lost in the mountains of Cuyamaca, lying with Boulder, near San Diego. In his delirium, he forgot how to perform simple tasks, such as driving his car. Fortunately, he always remembers knowing how to access the media from hard drives that are in his Airstream trailer.

Video files on discs inform us that he is investigating the reasons why his best separate friend, Charlie, went to the Cuyamacas and has gone mad. Charlie left old video bands with Kate, starring interviews in which Charlie has exposed theories of evolution linked to other intelligent species that had extinguished without trace years ago. The evidence has disappeared, but the mysterious sites always hold the truth. Additional images show disfigured people and amorphous monstrosity. Shortly after, Charlie took his life and Devon must know more.

Devon arrives in the Cuyamacas, one of the power sites. There, Adams discovers a virgin conexy storage container in the middle of the desert, which is used by some of the mutants of the video sequences that Charlie left behind. Devon becomes too curious, springs the conex and is attacked by one of the mutants.

Adams escapes his attacker and manages to steal a mold codex in the storage container. In addition, Kate discovered a volume on the history of the light of the Church of Heaven. This “church” and the mathematical codex reveal that Charlie’s alternative belief of an alternative evolution is true. These beings do not go out; They went underground and can travel between the dimensions through the shadows. Charlie was not what it seemed, and now Devon has intrusion into a kingdom with powers that he cannot understand. Professor Adams was chosen for something… bigger.

Prepare for the light of paradise. You don’t need eyes to see your Savior. Forget the mind to find your faith. The infidels will suffer forever. »»

A translation of a text of mathematical formulas in the tribes

Evaluation of Tribe

The tribes treat exhilarating stuff from the cosmos. And, as such, it can be a bit confusing. Asma manages the exhibition thanks to consultations with other teachers and translations of blasphemous volumes, as well as wild theories spoken by Charlie. It contains a little material “blow your mind”. Thus, connecting with the material can be a little delicate. Fortunately, he has an effective narrator. Asma, curiously, was not credited into the main role. It is perhaps to plunge the public into the vanity of the images found that all this is “real”.

Asma is convincing. He has a strange charm and is fully comfortable with the character. For someone who obtains his first actor call sheet (even an unspecified role) in the living environment, it is wonderful to look at. You don’t feel like you are repeating the lines. It is a cosmic experience of lived life. The rest of the distribution, however, does not also seem comfortable with the equipment, although the teachers he interviews feel like experts in the cryptic fields.

The influence of Buddha Jones pays dividends into this film. For an indie micro-budget image, the production values ​​and the visual effects are robust and dynamic. Again, the rapid edition of a trailer is obvious in the extracts of fragmented information inherent in a film of sequences found like this, and the result is well orchestrated. A logical defect in the design of the film, however, is that as a false documentary, the central figure of this film, Devon, could not have finished it. Logic of the images found! A classic use of the trope would be to announce that “this equipment was found in a box …” but the work is so well designed that it clearly had a qualified, even fictitious publisher.

Deep background

The original format for Tribe can be found in the digital fingerprints in history. Originally, this material was not part of Charlie; Instead, the light of the Church of Paradise concerned a lost tribe of “water heads” or a cult of hydrocephalic cultists. Asma created an Instagram page for “Insearchoftribes” uses a large part of the images of Tribesbut presented it as a series of video blog articles, offering A more documentary presentation. There are about fifty video clips that tell a very similar story. Some actors have been thrown into different roles, while others remain the same.

Moving Recalling the Blair Witch project, the marketing team has prepared a website that refers Devon Adams’ work. (Now professor of anthropology of Wisconsin). Although the script has changed, it is rare to see a outline format presented in this way. I don’t know how long these other sites were active before the film. This is certainly proof of touching a marketing specialist. It is very inventive, and I really like to see the transformation of one support translated into another.

Final reflections:

I like the images found in this way, documentary style. The use of images of body cam, drone, trail and historical VHS sequences all mix in a convincing and attractive combination. There are trembling images, but for the most part, it maintains focus. The effects hit well above their weight category, and I think that Asma can be proud to achieve a coherent and frightening story by sleeping a shortpoint of short video segments.

Tribe showed at HP Lovecraft Film Festival. If you are a fan of cosmic horror, it’s a pleasant watch. I appreciated the “Silurian theory” proposed by the plot. Admittedly, the era of the Silurian did not even have many creatures with thorns … or residents of earth … But still, it is a funny turn. There are so many things buried in the earth that we have not yet discovered. Who must say that there is no race of ancient beings that has escaped us … so far.

Tribes will be released in streaming on October 10, 2025 on Plex TV. The film is not classified. There is a little blood, a little violence, grotesque mutants and a coarse language, but it is not a film with a lot of reprehensible material. It should be good for mature adolescents.

Review by Eric Li