‘The Things You Kill’: The Twisty Homicidal Thriller That’s Stunning Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah—The sins of the father are an evil to overcome and a cross to bear in The Things You Kill, Alireza Khatami’s film about a Turkish university professor who embarks on a course of terrible, vengeful action. A thriller rooted in tangled ideas about masculinity, the Iranian American writer/director’s third feature is a quiet and formally rigorous portrait of a paternalistic society, the crimes it breeds, and the fury, shame, regret, and self-loathing that follows.

Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it cuts deep, even if its journey into the darkest recesses of the human heart is aided by a bit of familiar gimmickry.

Ali (Ekin Koç) is a part-time English teacher at his local university, and in The Things You Kill, his lessons focus on the word “translation,” which his student Mina (Dogo Dörtdogan) points out is, in Arabic, related to the word “kill.” Though this suggests that straddling a divide in order to communicate is somehow akin to homicide, Ali comes across as a rather meek sort of fellow, no matter his stern chiding of Mina for using her phone during class.

At home, his loving wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), who’s a “cow doctor,” is tolerant of her husband’s habit of spending his spare time at his remote garden. What she most cares about is having a child, and that’s the source of considerable stress for the couple, since they’ve been unable to conceive—the reason for which, Ali is informed by a specialist, is that he has a severely low sperm count.

Ali doesn’t tell Hazar this because he’s embarrassed and fearful that she’ll leave him, and his feelings of emasculation are amplified by his relationship with his father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), a domineering old-schooler who berates his son—after Ali has come to care for his physically impaired mother Anne (Güliz Sirinyam)—for never visiting or calling his mom.

Hamit additionally doesn’t take kindly to Ali chastising him about refusing to fix the house’s plumbing, arguing that it’s good for his disabled wife to get some exercise by walking to an outhouse. Theirs is a seriously tense relationship, and the opposite of Ali’s rapport with his mother, whom he compassionately cleans and cajoles into doing what’s necessary to improve her physical condition.

Following a bout of lovemaking, Ali receives word that Anne has died, and before he can arrive at her house, Hamit has already sent her body to the morgue. Hamit claims that he returned home late to a terrible smell and the discovery of Anne’s body on the kitchen floor. As Ali later learns, his mother was found lying face down and died from a fatal blow to the back of her head, raising his suspicions that his dad—who’s also a two-timing lout and a serial abuser, and has a gun hidden in an outdoor tank—had something to do with it.

Ali mulls such notions while tending to his arid garden, and in the company of Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a stranger who appears out of nowhere and convinces Ali to give him a job. Considering Reza’s horticultural knowledge, Ali agrees, and the two set about improving the land’s fertility.

Ali and Reza’s relationship is strange and so too is their decision, dramatized in somewhat out-of-the-blue fashion, to seek revenge based on their theory about Anne’s demise. The Things You Kill stages that incident in jarringly oblique darkness and then delivers a head-snapping twist that will likely leave audiences initially befuddled.

Once that confusion settles, however, the film reveals itself to be a descendant of a particular David Fincher hit (not to be explicitly named here), employing a narrative switcharoo to get to the core of Ali’s tormented inner division. There’s something unavoidably stunty about this device. Still, it aptly speaks to the protagonist’s struggle between action and inaction, strength and weakness, virility and impotence. Playing unlikely partners who share a surprising bond, the filmmaker’s leads pull it off with a requisite degree of nuance and intensity.

Khatami’s direction is key to making his script work, and it proves transfixing in those moments when he slowly zooms toward figures until the screen’s frame takes the place of the architectural borders (windows, doorways, etc.) that are surrounding them. A bravura shot which travels into, around, and magically out of a wall mirror is the film’s showstopper, facilitating its plot trickery and highlighting the material’s fascination with the relationship between interior and exterior spaces.

The Things You Kill marries its rigorous visuals with meticulous pacing that contributes to its mounting dread. That mood is sustained for an impressively long stretch as Ali reckons with the sudden disappearance of his father, revelations about the man’s infidelity, his sisters’ contentious attempts to settle the estate, and Hazar’s growing dissatisfaction with her spouse, the last of which is exacerbated by his raising the topic of divorce and continued absence.

The Things You Kill is a scrupulous inquiry into the effects of paternal abuse on subsequent generations. In an opening monologue, Hazar relays to Ali a dream she had about Hamit, during which he awakened her from sleep with loud banging on the door, lay down in the living room, and asked her to “kill the lights.” While Ali doesn’t know what to make of this reverie at outset, he understands, by tale’s conclusion, that it’s both a premonition and a transmissible vision of suffering, callousness, remorse, and implied violence.

Ali’s quest is a search for wholeness after a lifetime of (literal and figurative) fracturing, and Khatami constructs it as both a suspenseful slow-burn affair and a character study about the desire to accept, and heal, the scars of the past.

Whether through a precise focus pull or a deft pan, the writer/director implies that which is unspoken, even as he allows Ali to ultimately articulate—to an elder, in what amounts to an act of confession and exorcism—the cause of his misery. Better still, despite the straightforwardness of his central conceit, he leaves considerable room for mystery, implying in his closing passages that perhaps the things we feel most guilty about, and have to come to terms with, are merely figments of our tortured imagination.