The Things You Kill: disaster is always waiting in this taut Turkish thriller
A Turkish literary professor unravels when his mother dies in mysterious circumstances in Iranian director Alireza Khatami’s noirish nightmare.
- Reviewed from the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, Philip Larkin once wrote, and after watching Iranian director Alireza Khatami’s neo-noir thriller The Things You Kill, he might well have added your partner, your colleagues and your gardener. But really when the blame game becomes so extensive, it’s usually just deflection. We fuck ourselves up.
As always happens before things go badly, all seems well for Ali (Skin Koç), a university professor who lives with his beautiful veterinarian wife, played by Hazar Ergüçlü, – or “cow doctor” as his mother calls her – in the sort of apartment that looks more like a magazine profile of an apartment than a lived-in place.
But there are cracks in the pipes of life, and the actual pipes of his mum’s house. Ali’s position in the university is temporary; his mother is sick and his father (Ercan Kesal) is a brute. Even his relationship with his wife is put under strain when their attempts to have a baby are scuppered by his low sperm count. Ali takes this as such an affront to his masculinity that he lies about picking up the test results. He spends more time out at a garden plot in a stunningly beautiful valley, away from everyone and everything. But then Reza, played with affable scruffiness by Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, ambles over, and talks himself into a job as an on-site gardener, noting that the well isn’t deep enough. If that sounds ominous, that’s because it is.
Worse is to come when Ali’s beloved mother dies in mysterious circumstances and Ali himself begins to unravel, as he suspects familial foul play. Noir always had a surreal element. Its natural landscape is that of a nightmare where everything you didn’t want to happen is indeed happening. There are numerous plot lines and subplots that interlace The Things You Kill – Ali has a run in with a young student and Ali’s father is having an affair. It’s a deadly web. A major twist in the midway point of the film serves to upend everything and call into question core notions of identity (Ali is already troubled as a returned émigré who teaches English translation).
Khatami’s previous film Terrestrial Verses (2023) was a joint effort, a series of vignettes compiled with Ali Asgari. The Things You Kill a solo and personal film – two of the characters make up the director’s first name. There’s something of the dread of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Dostoyevskian slow burn Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) here, but Khatami keeps things as tightly wound as barbed wire in his intimate and intense study in disintegration.