The Things You Kill | 2025 Sundance Film Festival Review

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A Poison Tree: Khatami Deconstructs the Psychoses of Patriarchy

Alireza Khatami The Things You Kill ReviewFor his third feature, Iranian American director Alireza Khatami formulates a powerful psychodrama unspooling through the microcosm of normalized patriarchal dysfunction in Turkey with The Things You Kill. Employing a surreal Lynchian visual flourish to examine the potent psychological trauma of a protagonist whose breaking point from a disastrous reality is literally and figuratively comprised through the metaphor of a sterile garden, it’s also an elusive Biblical allusion to the allegory of Isaac and Abraham, where patricide catalyzes a psychotic fracture. Dedicating the film to his sisters, Khatami dives into the toxic attachment styles fostered and reinforced through repressive gender roles in a traditionally heteropatriarchal culture, where the absorption of oppression cements endless intergenerational trauma. But Khatami explores the aftermath of a reckoning, the consequences of which prove to be significant.

Ali (Ekin Koç) is a university professor in his native Turkey whose future seems uncertain. Teaching an English literary translation course which will not be offered again at the end of the semester, he’s also grappling with revealing to his wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) that he’s the source of their ongoing infertility issues. Similarly, he’s tending an increasingly barren garden of trees on the outskirts of the city. Despite his impending financial issues, he employs the services of a stranger, Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), who wanders by one day, professing to have a green thumb. Shortly after, Ali’s mother, who has been ailing for some years, dies under suspicious circumstances. Based on their family history, which includes a physically abusive father with whom Ali has a significantly contentious relationship, it would appear she was murdered to make way for legal recognition of his father’s longtime mistress. Confiding in Reza, the two men take it upon themselves to seek retribution by kidnapping the father, forcing him to dig his own grave at gunpoint. And then everything takes a strange, surreal turn when Ali must contend with his actions.

Alireza Khatami The Things You Kill Review

Khatami utilizes a layered approach to the film’s intertextual grappling with what’s going on, showcased through a pair of Ali’s lectures and through his own academic background, involving the study of comparative literature, which led him to the U.S. for fourteen years, widening the estrangement between his family and arguably with himself. Koç, who could be seen as the more polished, aspirational (and, therefore, de-culturated) focal point, twice explains the duty of a translator, which includes exploring the etymology of language, where meaning can be lost in translation but also recuperated under scrutiny. Bandying about how ‘targanmu’ means interpretation, a further jump to the Arabic root reveals an inference to stoning, and therefore killing. In essence, the act of translation connotes the figurative death of an origin. Thus, the things we kill can include our own selves in the act of defining one’s self as separate or apart from our origin, which in the case of Ali includes not only culturally but generationally.

Alireza Khatami The Things You Kill Review

Alireza Khatami’s personal connection to this presumably exaggerated narrative of murder, betrayal and deceit is reflected not only in the film’s dedication to his sisters but also the named fracturing of Ali and Reza, which lends a further sense of uneasily mined retribution. As the film ends, with a pounding reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Khatami’s latest still finds revenge is a dish best served cold. Like his acclaimed debut Oblivion Verses (2017), which utilizes a sense of magical realism to right a disastrous wrong, The Things You Kill arguably subverts a moral dilemma by reflecting eternal psychic consequences for its protagonist but also providing a sense of expiation for his creator. Like William Blake’s classic poem “A Poison Tree” asserts the disastrousness of brooding resentment, “I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.” We may run the risk of ruining ourselves and our relationships by confrontation, but something more resilient may rise from the wreckage.

★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

Reviewed on January 24th at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (41st edition) – World Cinema Dramatic Competition section. 114 mins.

Nicholas Bell
Nicholas Bell
Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), FIPRESCI, the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2023: The Beast (Bonello) Poor Things (Lanthimos), Master Gardener (Schrader). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.

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