Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill is set in a world that feels real and an illusion at the same time. He mixes elements of slow burn investigative thrillers and psychological dramas, suspense and horror, social realism and revenge films into a delirious cocktail of genres; one that is perplexing, disturbing and thought-provoking in equal measure.
The Canada-Turkey-Poland-France co-production had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and after travelling to several international festivals it has now been selected as Canada’s entry to the Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category.
Ali, after being in the USA for over a decade, returns to Turkey to teach a course in translation at the university. In his free time, he can be found in his garden by the mountains in the city outskirts. A good son to his ailing mother, he is overcome with anger on getting to know the cause of her sudden suspicious death and the inhuman way she had gotten treated during his stint abroad, something that had been kept a secret from him. Things come to a head when he plans a brutal act of vengeance for her death with the help of a stranger Reza who he had hired on a whim as the gardener.
Khatami keeps catching his audience off guard, in terms of the unpredictable progress of the plot, the tonal shifts in the narrative, the changing dynamics of individual behaviour and the ever-evolving grid of relationships.
It is all about parents and progenies—mother and son and father and son. Ali’s loyalty and love for the mother stands opposed to the hostility towards the father yet the inheritance of patriarchy is inevitable. Khatami shows how toxic masculinity ravages and ruins women. As Ali himself states, “agony seems reserved solely for women”. However, the filmmaker also points at how it poisons and destroys generations of men as it is passed down the family tree. Amid all this is also an angular look at the urge to procreate and propagate families (with Ali and his wife wanting to have kids of their own) despite the noxiousness and impotence—both physical and spiritual—that often lie at their core. However, Khatami doesn’t tutor his viewers, keeps them on the edge of the seat and at unease as he makes them face up to ideas of misogyny, traumas of the past, generational guilt, crime, retribution and punishment. Quite aptly then the narrative arc comes full circle, with the film bookended by nightmares—imagined, dreamt yet awfully real and endlessly haunting.
Khatami has a powerful ensemble of actors, most so Ekin Koc as Ali and Erkan Kolcak Kostendil as Reza, two sides of the same coin or split personalities (like the director’s own name ripped in two) representing the forces of light and darkness, but eventually acting together in perfect synchronicity.
With cinematographer Bartosz Swiniarski, Khatami plays with the landscape— the confinement of the cage-like home and the dry expanse of the garden, a visual evocation of Ali’s own familial discord and infertility respectively. But most of all Khatami takes us on a fascinating journey into the contours of the mind of a man. Ali’s real being and who he becomes when possessed by depravity and taken over by brutality. His conscious and unconscious selves, the many masks he wears, and the anxieties and existential crises that inform the core of his life.
The Things You Kill is an unhurried but riveting ride of a film, rich in subtexts and profundities and the many riddles, meanings and metaphors that Khatami leaves for the audience to plumb into and decipher.