“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç) withered patch of garden, and who just as mysteriously transplants himself into the latter’s spiraling life. The garden is located in the middle of nowhere, mountains and worlds away from where Ali lives. It’s not clear if he’s based in Ankara, although Gazi University — where he teaches American literature on a contract basis — certainly is. It’s also never really clear why he tends to the outback’s desiccated weeds with such resolve, or where its aggressive guard dog came from. But what remains palpable throughout Alireza Khatami’s third feature, The Things You Kill, is its darkly comic unease. Embroiled in a haze of guilt, shock, and foreboding, our hapless protagonist periodically confronts dead ends, while desperation and resentment bubble up inside him. And so he snaps.
The crux of the film has been stated, somewhat overtly, in Khatami’s second feature (co-directed with Ali Asgari): in one of Terrestrial Verses’ anthological segments, a renowned filmmaker tussles with Iran’s censors over concerns that his screenplay condones and even endorses “Western culture’s” conceptual import of patricide. Engaging hopelessly with the censor’s Orwellian doublespeak, the filmmaker — no doubt a fictionalized Khatami — tears out offending chunks from his script until little remains: the father does not beat the mother; the mother does not die; the son does not kill the father, etc. By and large, this offers a summary of The Things You Kill, grafted from Tehran to Turkey in metatextual fashion. Whereas parochialism and a resolutely patriarchal attitude positioned the satirical bent of Terrestrial Verses as a chiefly national issue, the acerbic yet deeply intimate register of Khatami’s latest speaks as much to personal demons as it does to broader societal ones.
Returning home after more than a decade abroad, Ali finds himself at the mercy of several moving parts in an ongoing midlife crisis, each problem arising before he scarcely has the time to process, much less resolve, the previous one. His low sperm count is a personal source of guilt and inadequacy, which he conceals from his wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü). His teaching job pays okay but not handsomely, and the university’s proposed budget cuts place him squarely on the chopping block. The pipes in his mother’s (Güliz Şirinyan) home are blocked, and its patriarch Hamit (Ercan Kesal), much to Ali’s chagrin, refuses to have them fixed. Ali’s mother is partly paralyzed, and before he can explore any restorative options, she dies. Such is the situation on the ground when Ali belatedly learns from one of his sisters that Hamit had previously struck their mother, rendering her unable to walk for two days. Suspecting his father, therefore, of some complicity in his mother’s passing, Ali reaches out to more relatives and snoops around the family home, only to catch him already with a younger, married woman (İpek Türktan).
Although rightly presented as a psychological thriller, The Things You Kill generally eschews the genre’s more derivative leanings to proffer a disarmingly earnest meditation on identity in crisis. This crisis isn’t solely the purview of a long-standing masculinity in shambles, though Ali does contend with his father’s shameful legacy and his own equally shameful inability to square up to it. Rather, much is sublimated over the course of days and weeks, mostly as he shuttles in between conversations and appointments, while his relationship with Reza takes a peculiar turn. With growing awareness of his distance from family and an increasing gulf setting apart thought from action, our protagonist dissociates, and his garden — despite its barren trappings — brims consequently with fertile psychoanalytic imagination. The dissociation arrives without warning, resists handy caricature, and juxtaposes Ali and Reza (the two halves of the director’s name) in untidy, ambiguous tension. Neither polar opposites nor muddled metaphors, they impugn the assumption of thematic and narrative coherence often ascribed to translations from the subjective to the sociological.
Indeed, translation plays an outsized role here, whether as the subject of Ali’s university lectures, the cross-cultural shift from a Farsi script to an ensemble of Turkish actors, or in the transmutative conceit at the film’s heart. Opening with Hazar recounting her dream — is it one? — of Hamit to Ali, The Things You Kill appears to divine the inevitable violence that has seeped through generations of men and that will, in turn, stain Ali’s hands. But what of its closing sequence, when this dream manifests like a Möbius strip, only to go beyond and hint at further iteration? A hint of pessimism tinges the contours of this shapeshifting narrative — at once social parable, character study, metaphysical puzzle, and propulsive nail-biter — but not without forcibly dislocating the viewer beyond its otherwise neat and distinct confines. The Arabic etymology for translation, as Ali notes, borrows from the signifier “to kill,” and in the same vein, comprehension precedes some form of destruction in the film. “Did your Mom tell bedtime stories?” Hazar asks him. “No. She didn’t like stories. She loved riddles.”
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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