‘The Things You Kill’ movie review: Alireza Khatami’s shape-shifting psychological thriller dismantles the myth of the self-aware man 

Having spent much of his filmmaking career navigating the practical and ideological constraints of state censorship, Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami has developed an elastic relationship with geography. His previous features — Oblivion Verses, produced in Chile and spoken in Spanish, and Terrestrial Verses, co-directed with Ali Asgari inside Iran — had already exposed national borders as institutions far better at policing artists than restricting the ideas those artists smuggle across. His latest work, The Things You Kill, extends that philosophy by transplanting a script originally written in Farsi into an unnamed Turkish city after Iranian censorship made its original setting untenable. But the relocation feels more than a mere cosmetic disguise because Khatami has built the film around the very instability of translation and identity, making the history of its production inextricable from the drama unfolding on screen.

That film follows Ali Özdilek (Ekin Koç), a university lecturer who teaches translation studies while failing every performance of masculinity his social environment expects him to embody. His temporary academic contract faces cancellation, his fertility tests reveal an alarmingly low sperm count that he hides from his veterinarian wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), and his return from fourteen years in the United States has left him stranded inside a homeland that no longer feels capable of accommodating the version of himself that developed abroad. Ali’s fractured identity accumulates through mundane humiliations that slowly expose the machinery of patriarchal expectations.

The screenplay patiently constructs that machinery before introducing a destabilising rupture. Ali worries about his partially paralysed mother, suspecting his father Hamit (Ercan Kesal) has continued years of domestic abuse, and retreats regularly to an isolated garden whose failing irrigation system feels inseparable from his own infertility. When his mother dies under questionable circumstances, and a wandering labourer named Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) appears seeking work, Khatami gradually transforms this seeming family tragedy into something far stranger, with the blossoming relationship between these two men absorbing questions of desire, repression and inherited violence.

From here on out, the film soon begins speaking fluent Kiarostami, with frequent odes to David Lynch, often even inheriting Dostoevsky’s fascination with guilt as a self-generating force. Yet, Khatami wears none of these influences as cinephile credentialism, since every surreal, psychological rupture through his formal choices remains tethered to Ali’s steadily disintegrating consciousness.

A still from ‘The Things You Kill’
| Photo Credit:
Bir Film

A classroom lecture crystallises the film’s ambitions, where Ali explains that the etymology of translation historically implies carrying meaning across languages, while another linguistic root associates the process with destruction or killing, suggesting every successful act of communication simultaneously erases an earlier version of itself. This single idea governs everything which follows, including Ali’s shifting relationship with Turkish society, Khatami’s relocation of the screenplay from Iran, the uncanny exchanges between Ali and Reza, and the film’s fascination with code-switching as a cultural survival strategy and psychological self-defence. Social media has flattened identity into an exercise in perpetual self-curation, rewarding people who can seamlessly code-switch between audiences, and it looks like Khatami follows that logic to its most disturbing conclusion by asking what remains once performance hardens into instinct and the original self can no longer reclaim authorship over its own life.

Khatami’s aestheticism sustains that conceptual richness because Polish cinematographer Bartosz Swiniarski consistently denies us spatial certainty. Long static compositions trap characters inside windows and doorframes, with shifting focus redrawing their sense of authority within individual shots. One extraordinary mirror shot is so devilishly constructed that I replayed it five times, trying to reverse-engineer the trick (an increasingly futile attempt before finally accepting that Khatami and Swiniarski had simply outplayed me).  The shot also seems to give away the film’s thesis in the sense that the mirror represents a threshold where competing versions of Ali litigate ownership of the same life.

A still from ‘The Things You Kill’
| Photo Credit:
Bir Film

Even the film’s most shocking turns retain an almost disquieting serenity. Khatami has enough confidence in his material to leave the shouting to lesser thrillers, building dread through silence and measured blocking, and leaving the rest up to the tremendously restrained performances from Koç and Köstendil. Once the narrative abandons conventional Turkish realism, those accumulated formal decisions pay enormous dividends since every destabilising revelation feels like the inevitable culmination of visual and psychological cues that have been gathering in plain sight from the opening act. 

The film sometimes risks overdetermining its symbolism, particularly where infertility and inheritance converge with correspondence obvious enough for us to connect. Yet, even these metaphors continually and deliberately complicate any straightforward interpretation.

Ali spends much of the film believing that patriarchy belongs to previous generations. He returns from fourteen years in America imagining that liberal education and self-awareness have permanently exiled him from his father’s violence, until Khatami cruelly demonstrates that merely recognising a system rarely prevents you from reproducing it. Much to Ali’s chagrin, The Things You Kill seems to suggest that there is nothing more performative than patricide if you haven’t first murdered the version of yourself your father already built.

The Things You Kill is is available to rent or purchase on BookMyShow Stream