‘The Things You Kill’ Review: A Thrilling Murder Mystery About Becoming What You Fear

The long shadow of patriarchal violence looms over much of writer-director Alireza Khatami’s third feature, The Things You Kill. While we don’t know all the reasons that led Ali (Ekin Koç) to leave his native Turkey for the United States to study and teach literature, it’s clear that the controlling and, at times, physically abusive behavior of his father, Hamit (Ercan Kesal), played a role. Tensions between Hamit and Ali, who moved back to Turkey several years back after 14 years abroad, are high whenever the latter stops over to visit his partially paralyzed mother (Güliz Şirinyan). Ali suspects that his father is preventing her from leaving the house and knows he’s beaten her in the past, and when she dies suddenly, supposedly from an accidental fall, Ali’s grief and anger overtake him in chaotic ways.

What follows initially appears like a conventional revenge tale, spurred on by the long-brewing animosity between a father and his son. But Khatami—whose last film, the terrifying Terrestrial Verses, was an examination of the ways Iran’s authoritarian regime controls the lives of its citizens—crafts a narrative that’s ultimately surprising and subtly enigmatic in its examination of the nature of masculinity and the stranglehold that notions surrounding it have on a family, and nation, determined to uphold the status quo at all costs.

The noxious effects of Ali’s resentment and hostility toward the unthinking, domineering Hamit are at first hinted at via clear-eyed symbolism. The plumbing beneath Ali’s parents’ house is old and malfunctioning, while the water used to sustain Ali’s large, rural garden is partially blocked due to poorly laid piping. Even Ali himself has “plumbing” issues, having been diagnosed as unlikely to conceive a child with his wife, Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), because of his low sperm count. Any way you cut it, the malfeasance of the patriarchy is gumming up the works.

These metaphors all speak to the mostly unacknowledged social and interpersonal dysfunction that plagues Ali’s family, and which he continues to hopelessly rebel against. His mother and sisters, Nesrin (Selen Kartanan) and Meriem (Idil Engindeniz), do little to push back against Hamit’s belligerent behavior, and Nesrin has even kept her father’s affair a secret from everyone for years. But Khatami isn’t interested in condemning these women, as he understands that their deference to the imperious head of the family is culturally sanctioned.

Across The Things You Kill, Khatami homes in on Ali’s lonesome struggle to break free from patterns of abuse that, as we eventually learn, began at least as far back as Hamit’s father. Following Ali’s mothers death, a drifter, Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), takes on a low-paying gig helping Ali with his garden, and his arrival is the catalyst for Ali to confront his understanding of his own masculinity in relation to that of his father’s. And in a nod to Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, the actors playing Reza and Ali repeatedly swap roles throughout the rest of the film. This device reflects Ali’s struggle to both reject the abhorrence of his father’s behavior and all that it represents and avoid the allure of violent retribution and overwhelming feelings of emasculation in the face of his low sperm count.

Wisely, neither Koç nor Köstendil act in more traditionally macho or submissive ways when playing either the roles of Ali or Reza, nor does Khatami couch things in the familiar trope of revealing that a newly arrived stranger never existed in the first place. Rather, The Things You Kill plays out with a beguiling ambiguity, conveying the inscrutable instability of an identity in flux. The film’s playfully surreal touches, which are startlingly amplified in the final few scenes, convey the difficulties of not only escaping the grip of patriarchal power, but in not allowing its ideology to insidiously creep into one’s own actions to escape or destroy it.