Rating: NR | Runtime: 114 minutes
Release Date: April 25th, 2025 (Turkey) / November 14th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Bir Film / Cineverse Entertainment
Director(s): Alireza Khatami
Writer(s): Alireza Khatami

No one is resentful by nature.

I was awed by the moment. Ali (Ekin Koç) is seen inside the hut overlooking his garden when the camera finds a broken mirror hanging by the door. It’s through its reflection that we then watch Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) approaching from the field with a request for water. When Ali complies and takes the bottle from his hand, the camera pushes in farther to remove the mirror’s frame. And, almost imperceptibly, the blemishes upon the glass fade while the lens continues its pan … back to the mirror. We’ve impossibly escaped reality’s constraints.

It’s a gorgeous piece of filmmaking on writer/director Alireza Khatami’s part both because of its visual intrigue and its ability to explain that which we don’t yet know needs explaining. We shouldn’t be surprised by the latter, though, considering The Things You Kill begins with Ali’s wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) relaying a strange dream she had about his father. This veil between perception and knowledge is present throughout the film, so Khatami actually wants us to interpret that shot differently. We didn’t escape the mirror. We entered it.

The entire film is built upon these complex reflections of ourselves. Whether it be our present in relation to the past and/or future or our identity in relation to our parents and/or children, our entire lives become echoes of what was and what might be. It therefore falls on us to choose how this truth impacts our own personal journeys. Will we reject our problematic heritage and destroy it to be better? Will we become victims to its never-ending cycle? Will we believe we’re doing the former only to realize it’s just a different form of the latter?

These are the questions Ali doesn’t even know he’s asking because he’s tried so hard to forget their presence. He’s a man at a crucial crossroads wherein the contradictions of his life can no longer be ignored. The why of leaving Turkey to study abroad in America. The why of returning home. He needed to get away from his domineering father (Ercan Kesal’s Hamit) to neither become him nor kill him. And he needed to come back to his mother (Güliz Sirinyan’s Sakine) to make up for not being able to protect her from him in youth.

Ali must now also worry about his own desire to start a family. To finally see if his father’s violence exists within him. Since he now has the confidence to stand up to his dad and call out his misbehavior, his fear shifts to an uncertainty in having the wherewithal to call out his own. So, what is the real reason he neglects to tell Hazar that his sperm count is preventing them from conceiving? Yes, it’s an intrinsic sense of toxic masculinity and an inability to be vulnerable. But it’s also an excuse to avoid his worst fate.

Avoidance is hardly better, though. Bottling your emotions inevitably ensures they’ll come out uncontrollably later. So, as Ali struggles to reconcile who he might become with who he hopes to be, he heads towards an inflection point. To not have a baby means never being a bad father, but what if telling Hazar he doesn’t want one means he won’t be a husband either? Then there’s also being a law-abiding citizen versus bending the law for an advantage. Can he still demand accountability from others if he can’t hold himself to account?

That brings us to Sakine’s death and the many questions that surround it thanks to what Ali knows and what his sisters have been hiding from him at her behest. If the themes of patriarchy weren’t already evident, they will be now as we witness how much these women have been conditioned to accept and how much a man’s ability to be heard within that system can allow his good intentions to evaporate with one bad impulse. Is Hamit a bad man regardless of his own trauma making him that way? Yes. Enough to kill his wife? Maybe.

It’s a question Khatami intentionally doesn’t answer. The fact Hamit’s son believes it to be true is enough. But the filmmaker also doesn’t fully answer what happens next once Ali enlists Reza to help seek revenge. Because we entered the mirror and all bets are off as far as objectivity is concerned. Figures in dreams are just as easily explained as ghosts if the search for meaning is replaced by the nightmarish potential of instinct. All we know for sure is that Ali considers embracing his urge for violence. Does he get lost in its rage? Or does it remind him why he can’t?

While everything that occurs within The Things You Kill does so with purpose, so too does everything outside of it. Namely your confusion when a character inexplicably takes the form of another. Think David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but en route to a possibility for redemption rather than pure oblivion. Khatami needs us off-balance to accept the actions Ali commits post-transmutation. It allows us to recognize his path’s divergence and still hope he might fight the craving to give into the darkness. The puzzle comes into focus when he makes his choice.

It’s a stunning piece of cinema that gets beneath the surface of an all-too familiar story to give form to the universal psychological struggle at its back. Because this isn’t a Muslim problem or Evangelical problem. It’s a human problem. The patriarchy exists wherever society demands its specific brand of gender norms are baked into the very laws that govern it. Khatami wrote the film to be set in Iran only for the government to demand he remove a crucial event, so he shifted to Turkey instead. It would have worked just as well in America too.

---

Hazar Ergüçlü and Ekin Koç in THE THINGS YOU KILL; courtesy of Cineverse.