Following its Sundance world premiere in early 2025, The Things You Kill, the third feature from Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, is set to screen in Philippine theaters as part of the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival. Selected as the Canadian submission for the 2026 Oscar Best International Feature Film category, the movie was originally written in Farsi, but Iranian censors forced the director to rework the material and set it elsewhere.
The story centers on Ali (Ekin Koç), a man in his early 30s who is married to the much younger veterinarian Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü). After spending 14 years on American soil, Ali returns to his Turkish hometown to teach literature at a local university, only to realize that it’s far from the homecoming he’s expecting. His job at the university remains at risk, as does his relationship with his wife as they struggle to conceive a child due to Ali’s low sperm count, indicated by a test result he initially keeps a secret. Most vexing of all, his mother is severely ailing and aging, and his abusive, indifferent father Hamit (Ercan Kesal) is no help.
Ali’s unassertive nature largely finds him tending to the family’s garden plot in a rather remote yet beautiful valley, where Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a no-nonsense drifter with no clear history, approaches him, offering cheap, on-site labor to take care of the property, which Ali gladly accepts. When his beloved mother suddenly dies, Ali harbors suspicions and proceeds to play detective to uncover what happened after the fact, enlisting his enigmatic gardener in the process. What he unearths, though, is perhaps past what he is ready to confront, allowing Khatami’s vision to escalate from an intense grief drama into a slippery, dreadful study of masculinity and tradition.
That the director bifurcates his first name into the names of his two central characters already gives the film a meta quality and indicates its assertion about identity and the many forms of violence one encounters to realize such identity. But instead of a straightforward psychological thriller, one that is hinged on forceful turns and twists, Khatami insists on a Lynchian dream logic to ennoble the proceedings and the film’s more realistic mounting. The director, alongside cinematographer Bartosz Świniarski, reflects this dream logic through the use of lenses that constantly shift focus, akin to sleepwalking, and, to some extent, literalizes it, in that Ali is often portrayed in various states of slumber. The director also resorts to a lot of foreshadowing, which readily provides the picture with the allure of deductive investigation.
One might even reckon that Reza is more an imagined figure than real, yet what is clear is that both Ali and Reza serve as surrogates not just for the director himself but for a kind of lived reality disrupted by patriarchal violence, whether that reality be considered in the context of contemporary Iran or other parts of the world. And despite being surrogates, Khatami still writes each character, and by extension all of his characters, with real texture and intention. There’s a good balance between being symbolic and having characters that register as dynamic and lived-in. It helps that the performances are strikingly great, too. And while I don’t think the film’s choices and detours always work, they nevertheless make for a thriller that gets more stunning as it becomes more diffused and labyrinthine.
The Things You Kill (Öldürdüğün Şeyler) recently played at the QCinema International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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