©Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

After participating in the most prestigious European Film festivals like Cannes, Venice and Berlin, the American Iranian author Alireza Khatami lands at the Sundance Film Festival with his latest, stunning feature film. Selected for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, The Things You Kill tells the story of Ali, a college professor haunted by the figure of an oppressive and violent father. When his sick mother dies in mysterious circumstances, the man immediately starts suspecting his father could be responsible for her departure. Unable to bear anymore his frustration, the professor decides to take action…

The third movie directed by Khatami owns two different levels of analysis, and both are totally effective and perfectly mixed, in order to create something that can entertain and at the same time talk about contemporary issues. Set in Turkey’s rural landscape – Khatami decided to set it in Iran to avoid censorship – The Things You Kill is first and foremost a gripping psychological thriller. The protagonist is stuck in a present which is absolutely precarious for him and his wife.

Incapable to project himself into the future – he and his wife are going through fertility treatments because she desperately wants a baby – while eager to escape his painful past, Ali is richly developed by the screenplay: the plot in fact lets the audience discover scene after scene not only the character’s background but most importantly his twisted feelings about his family. The sense of suspicion that grows in him is depicted by Khatami like a possible effect of his own complex condition, it could be paranoia generated by a moment in his life where everything seems to be fragile.

©Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

The director uses the camera to endorse this sense of unbalanced reality with long and elegant takes like the stunning one that opens the movie. The Things You Kill is built through an atmosphere both realistic and suffocating, which brings the viewer to constantly question the truth of what he is experiencing. When Khatami wants to explicitly expose the duality of his main character, the fictional mechanism he uses is highly effective, it works with precision and some kind of weird coherence. The plot and mise-en-scene drive Ali and his personal demons into a final sequence that is enigmatic, dark, almost flirting with the psychological horror, ending a movie conceived and realized with outstanding creativity. 

The other level that makes The Things You Kill work so well is obviously the more metaphorical. The struggle of the modern Turkish generation, which should lead the Country out of the ancient and conservative patriarchy, is portrayed through a series of symbolic settings that make the movie even more powerful. There is no hiatus between the story and the message behind it: Khatami talks about oppression, censorship, denial, violence with precision and emphatic participation. The story of Ali becomes the story of a Country still incapable of breaking the chains of a power that uses coercion, destabilization and violence as tools to endure its status quo. The best way to free oneself from this is mentally, but as Ali shows with painful clarity it’s going to be a long, dangerous process. 

There is a thin but fascinating link between The Things You Kill and The Seed of the Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof, which obtained the Academy Award nominee as Best International Film. Both these works start as psychological thrillers but dare to move away from the simple definition of genre using a personal vision. Khatami and Rasoulof have been capable of inserting such powerful symbolisms in their images, addressing contemporary issues about the world they lived in just using the cinema at its best and most powerful declination. This is nothing but remarkable. 

©Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

Rate: A-

If you liked the review, share your thoughts below.

Check out more of Adriano’s articles. 

Meet the Artist 2025: Alireza Khatami on “The Things You Kill”