The Things You Kill

Premise

Ali, a Turkish university professor, is enraged by the suspicious circumstances of his ailing mother's death. During his grieving process, Ali reveals his resentment for his estranged father and befriends a gardener named Reza whom he enlists to avenge his mother's death.

Plot

Turkish literature professor Ali talks to his wife Hazar about the dream she had; she says in the dream, Ali's father knocked on the door of their home, demanded to come inside, then lay down and asked for the light to be turned off.

Ali visits his mother, who was disabled when Ali's father beat her some years before. He notes that their home is dilapidated, with the indoor toilet broken. He also finds a gun in a bag in the septic tank. When he offers to pay for the toilet to be repaired so that her ailing mother doesn't have to use the outhouse, his father shames him and sends him away. He suffers what he feels are other humiliations: he discovers that he has low fertility − a fact he keeps from his wife − and that his teaching position at a local university may be cut.

Ali's mother dies after being found face-down in her locked home. Ali's father, Hamit, found her body, but took a long time to call the family. Ali remonstrates with his father, who shames him in front of his family. He goes home distraught, and says that the regrets returning to Turkey from the US.

At a farm on the city's outskirts that Ali is attempting to revive, he meets Reza, and hires him as a gardener. Reza is intimidated by Ali's large dog. Reza says that the farm will require a deep well to be made fertile, and that will require machinery and planning permission.

As Ali's stress over his infertility and job insecurity grows, so does his isolation from Hazar. He begins to investigate the circumstances of his mother's death. He discovers that she suffered a fatal blow to the back of the head, despite being found face-down. He comes to believe that his father was responsible.

He and Reza kidnap Hamit and make him dig his own shallow grave in the desert. Ali begins to have second thoughts, but Reza beats Hamit unconscious and tells Ali to fill the grave in. Ali begins to cry, but Reza threatens Ali.

Reza chains up Ali at the farm in the shelter where the dog lived − it has now vanished − and assumes his life. Nobody seems to notice. Ali's wife, sick of being shut out, leaves him. Reza, now working Ali's job at a university, agrees to sleep with a pretty student in exchange for giving her a higher grade, but when he takes her back to Ali's parents' home to have sex, he encounters his father's mistress, whom he berates and sends away.

Cast

Ekin Koç as Ali, a Turkish university professor teaching in the United States

Erkan Kolçak Köstendil as Reza, a gardener that Ali befriends

Hazar Ergüçlü as Hazar, Ali's wife

Ercan Kesal as Hamit, Ali's father

Production

Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami wrote, directed, and co-produced The Things You Kill; it was his third feature film following Oblivion Verses (2017) and Terrestrial Verses (2023, which he co-directed with Ali Asgari). Khatami cited the work of David Lynch as one of his primary inspirations for the movie, saying that he was "in awe" of the types of unorthodox stylistic choices made by Lynch that are uncommon in Eastern filmmaking.

Khatami characterized the script as a work of autofiction, telling Variety that he "[doesn't] even know how to show this to [his] family because 70% of it is based on shared experiences". Khatami also stated that he hoped to undermine "what the audience expects from a 'brown filmmaker'", calling the first half of the film a Trojan horse.

The film was co-produced by Khatami through the studio Tell Tall Tale, Elisa Sepulveda-Ruddoff from the French studio Fulgurance, Cyriac Auriol of Remora Films (France), Mariusz Włodarski of Lava Films (Poland), and Michael Solomon of Band With Pictures (Canada). Marta Gmosińska, Cenk Ünalerzen, and film star Ekin Koç also contributed to the production through the Turkish studio Sineaktif. The film received support from several institutions: Eurimages, the Polish Film Institute, Telefilm Canada, Arte Cofinova, World Cinema Fund, Torino Feature Lab, and the Île-de-France government.

Release

In May 2024, during post-production, Best Friend Forever acquired the international distribution rights to The Things You Kill, and Le Pacte acquired the rights for distribution in France. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 24 and will make its Sundance digital debut on January 30.

It competed in the 'Progressive Cinema Competition - Visions for the World of Tomorrow' section of the 20th Rome Film Festival in October 2025.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 36 critics' reviews are positive. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Carlos Aguilar of Variety gave the film a positive review, calling it an "astutely written exercise in paying attention to how one is perceived and using that knowledge to rewrite one’s own narrative". Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire gave the film an A− grade, writing that it is "like a bad, sweat-breaking dream that leaves you dazed and feverish — and a black-hearted gaze into the poison patriarchy oozes into men’s veins just as much as women".

Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter was critical of the film, calling it "stale" and writing that "there’s something about The Things You Kill that ultimately leaves the viewer cold, even if all the strange and awful stuff Ali goes through leads him to finally open up and, perhaps, lighten up".

The film was named the winner of the Best Canadian Film award at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival.

The film was named to the Toronto International Film Festival's annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list for 2025.