The existential apocalypse of a Turkish literature professor gets an oblique and frightening study in “The things you kill” On its surface, this worrying dipryk about male anxiety has the feeling of, say, an Asghar Farhadi movie, a moral dilemma that drives a thriller entrance. But it is exactly the kind of Iranian writer/director Alireza Khatami that is tense and nightmare. film Starting to resemble more something like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Khatami (“Earthly verses“), Who lives in Canada, the environment moved from Iran to Turkey to avoid censorship in its home country – a censorship of patriarchal violence that the film itself also calls as a warning bell on a bleak future.
“The things you kill“Ends with the same enigmatic row -” Kill Light ” – spoken by two very different people. One is carried out of a dream, the other a nightmare, and they form the beginning and end of an existential death sentence around the unfortunate Ali (Ekin Koç). He is at the beginning of his 30s, handsome and married to a beautiful, 10 year younger veterinarian (Hazar Ergüçlü). But the cracks are starting to form. Somewhere in a Turkish city he teaches in a dissatisfied classroom in translated Western literature, a course he is mocked for by administrators and one that will be canceled the next semester. His low sperm count prevents him from getting pregnant despite his wife’s desperate desire to do so, and only reminds me that he is the problem, the common denominator for all his misfortune. He has a tense relationship with his father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), who looks at his son and just sees disappointment. “What did I do as Allah gave me such a son?” His mother is meanwhile a geriatric wreck that needs attention around the clock.
Like the compulsive rotation of a pen to a sharpener, Khatami spans the narrative rope to an unbearable effect with a series of ominous prejudices. The plumbing system seems to be broken everywhere, there is a gun hidden in a water tank, and a crucial mirror opens almost like a portal and sucks Ali into it. In a distance length, without urgency to zoom in – Khatami and cinema photographer Bartosz Swiniarski sometimes work with lenses that go in and out of focus to suggest that you wake up or come from a dream – Ali and his sisters Nesrin and Meriam gather around for the horrible News. Their mother was found dead, with Hamit outside the property at the time of her case.
However, the death is suspected because an autopsy report reveals that she died of a bleeding caused by an unknown blunt trauma in the back of the head. But did she fall down with her face? Hamit has a history of anger and abuse, which leads Ali down on a darker path that, strangely enough, can end up gaining momentum on his impotent life. In a society that benefits a patriarchal family provider over someone who cannot even raise a child, who cannot fulfill reverent prophecies because of his own emotional violation, Ali is an overall rude man according to the standards of society. But if he can sort out his mother’s death and stifle the chain of patriarchal violence, one that he is now ready to absorb, at the roots, maybe he can save himself.
While “The Things You Kill” resides on specific Muslim issues – the forced piety that can lead to a sleeping in life, the women who are pushed away by society – Khatami is looking for a more universal effect here and challenging the notion that his story must be Muslim by introducing Western filmmaking methods and allusions. Although Khatami’s deceased loved compatriot Kiarostami remains a true northern star.
As a healing, an enigmatic gardener (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) enters into the framework with a proposal that Ali cannot refuse, or may want to become himself. The gardener already seems to have a love for long stories, with a notebook full of doodles and an English -language pocket book he reads. And is it Ali’s clothes he suddenly wear? The Anatolian mountains, where Ali takes care of a barren garden, gives an ominous background from which everything, not just a vagabond who has fallen as from heaven, can suddenly show up.
Here is when “The Things You Kill” puts in a higher, insidious gear. After a sudden and brutal act of violence, the film itself seems to be brained, a key member changed and a version of Ali who now lives in an alternative reality that is very close to the first half of the film, but everything is just a bit of a bit. Hence the echoes from “Lost Highway”, where the character played by Bill Pullman in David Lynch’s eerie primer on male violence was replaced by Balthazar Getty during the second half. The comparisons with Abbas Kiarostami come in self -conscious formalism in “The Things You Kill”. A la Iranian director Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” – a tradition of non -linear filmmaking khatami is much more invested in than its contemporary countrymen – it would not be a shock for the film to cut to his own director, with a camera. This film is about the infectious power of the story – which includes lies and self -deception – and what potentially fatal device it may be wrong or even the right hands. And what is wrong or right happens? Khatami does not respond to any of it. Although the self -awareness of the style threatens to dampen the emotional effect of the story, Khatami here is not a particularly emotional filmmaker. I would put him closer on the way to a horror director.
“The Things You Kill” is like a bad, sweat -breaking dream that makes you dumb and feverish – and a black -hearted look into the poison patriarchy seeps into men’s veins as much as women. Ali, as a male feminist who is hip for that particular system, thinks he has taken everything. But Ali also puts the tracks, and what Khatami brilliant does here is to tip the tracks with land mines that implodes all the way to the last, dying line: “Kill the light.” You can’t stop what’s coming, and what’s coming is worse than you thought.
Rating: A-
“The Things You Kill” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States. Best Friend Forever handles sales.
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