‘The Things You Kill’ Review

Canada’s Oscar Submission

Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill is not a film that gently invites you in. It quietly traps you. It closes doors behind you without ceremony. It asks you to sit inside grief, masculinity, memory, and silence, and then watches what you do once the room starts shrinking. At first glance, it plays like a restrained psychological thriller. In reality, it feels closer to a fever dream disguised as domestic realism.

The film follows Ali, a literature professor living in a rural Turkish town, whose life begins to unravel after the suspicious death of his mother. He is not a man in control of his own story. His academic career feels like it is fading into irrelevance. His body refuses to give him what his marriage quietly demands. His relationship with his father exists only as a wound that never healed. There is grief here, but there is also shame, resentment, and an inherited weight that he does not know how to set down.

What makes this film feel singular is its obsession with transformation as a kind of self-erasure. In one of Ali’s lectures, he explains that the Arabic root of the word ‘translate’ can also mean ‘to kill’. It is a devastating idea. To carry something from one state into another means destroying what it used to be. Trauma becomes a language that rewrites the self by erasing earlier drafts. Memory becomes something you survive by murdering the person who once felt it fully.

That idea sits at the center of everything. Ali’s descent is not about revenge as much as it is about identity. He does not merely want justice. He wants relief. He wants to become someone who does not feel small, powerless, ashamed, and discarded. When gardener Reza enters the story, the dynamic shifts into something more hypnotic and more dangerous. Reza is not just a person. He feels like a possibility. A version of manhood Ali has never been able to access without violence.

The film is saturated with symbols that feel natural rather than decorative. Mirrors flicker with fractured selves. Seeds are planted and never quite bloom. Water becomes a symbol of desire, scarcity, and power. Language itself becomes a metaphor for rupture. The gardener is not simply a worker. He is a reflection. Even the names feel intentional, with Ali and Reza forming a quiet echo of the director’s own name, turning the film into something that feels personal and suspiciously self-interrogating.

There is a hypnotic confidence in how Khatami builds mood. The first half of this film is ridiculously gripping. It is quiet, slow, and precise, but never dull. You can feel dread sitting in the corners of rooms. You can feel the weight of something unspoken in casual conversations. There are moments where the film flirts with a kind of Lynchian unease, not in style but in spirit. You feel like reality is thinning even when nothing overtly strange is happening.

And yet, for every moment that clicks perfectly into place, there is another where the film feels almost willfully opaque. This is where my relationship with the film started to fracture. I admire its ambition. I admire its refusal to spoon feed meaning. But there were stretches where I felt more distanced than immersed. The atmosphere is thick. The philosophy is heavy. At times, it feels more invested in its puzzles than in letting the audience breathe emotionally inside its characters. I found myself wondering whether I was supposed to feel something or solve something.

Still, the craftsmanship is undeniable. The cinematography is controlled and quietly stunning. The camera lingers without vanity. It watches rather than announces. The landscapes feel emptied out in a way that mirrors Ali’s emotional landscape. The sound design is almost cruel in its effectiveness. Small sounds like footsteps, water, breath, and silence become louder than any score. The mirror work in particular is astonishing. There is a shot involving a mirror that made my stomach drop because of how simple and how devastating it was.

What ultimately held my attention even when I felt removed was the film’s thematic weight. This is a story about generational inheritance that feels less like a concept and more like a curse. Violence does not arrive from nowhere. It travels down bloodlines like a virus. Masculinity here is not heroic or stabilizing. It is poisonous, brittle, and quiet in the most dangerous way. Women exist inside this system in ways that are equally painful, often expected to endure, to normalize, to survive without disrupting the structure that harms them.

Ali’s conflict does not feel like good versus evil. It feels like light versus darkness. It feels like two versions of the same wounded person struggling over which one gets to exist. Reza does not feel like a monster. He feels like the man Ali is too afraid to be without destroying himself. The film constantly asks whether killing parts of yourself ever truly sets you free or whether it just creates new ghosts.

There is also something deeply unsettling about how the film handles space and land. The orchard is supposed to be a place of growth. Instead, it becomes a site of moral erosion. The well becomes a symbol of greed and desperation. Water is not just water. It is survival, power, denial. Even small details like the presence of two different mineral water bottles become emotional signposts rather than props. Everything feels intentional without feeling ornamental.

Where the film loses some of its power for me is in its emotional access. I felt more admiration than connection. I felt more intrigue than heartbreak. That is not necessarily a failure. It feels like a deliberate choice. This is a film that wants you to observe rot in real time, not necessarily grieve it. I walked out feeling bewildered, slightly chilled, and strangely intact, like I had witnessed something intimate but been kept just outside its skin.

And yet, I cannot deny how bold it feels. This is not a safe film. It does not chase clarity. It does not soften its edges. It believes in confusion as a valid emotional state. It trusts the audience to sit with discomfort without handing them a map.

By the time the film reaches its final movements, it feels less like a story and more like a psychological state. The images loop back on themselves in a way that feels cyclical rather than conclusive. It does not feel like an ending. It feels like a recurrence. Like the beginning of the same story told from a more exhausted place.

The Things You Kill is not a film I found easy to love. It is a film I found hard to ignore. It is hypnotic, frustrating, bold, and deeply considered. It feels like something that will grow in the mind over time rather than resolve itself in the moment. It is a psychological drama wrapped in a thriller’s clothing, more interested in what survives after violence than in the violence itself.

This is a film about what we bury, what we inherit, and what we try to kill inside ourselves in order to keep breathing. Sometimes, the most dangerous thing you can do is survive yourself.