Alireza Khatami’s fractured mirror of a nation
For its first hour, The Things You Kill (2025) assumes to be another well-lit domestic tragedy from the Middle East: filial duty, moral decay, patriarchal suffocation. Ali (Ekin Koç), a university professor, bathes his ageing father in a scene that seems plucked from A Separation, the educated son tending the frail patriarch while avoiding the more corrosive emotional rot beneath. Then something ruptures. The film abandons realism, and drifts into meta-theatre. What looked like a chamber piece about guilt turns into a self-reflexive act of psychic disintegration.
Khatami, an Iranian filmmaker of Turkish-speaking heritage now based in Canada, calls the work “an attempt to reconcile with the legacy of violence within my family.” He explains that Iranian censors forced him to cut the story’s patricide, so he relocated the film to Turkey, where he could “preserve its psycho-political examination of patriarchy.” That act of translation gives the film its pulse: a story exiled from its homeland, finding uneasy shelter in another fractured republic.
Khatami treats the figure of the father as both private tormentor and political metaphor. The recurring images of Atatürk, “Father of the Turks”, hover like secular icons above the characters, collapsing the line between filial obedience and civic submission. Khatami describes Atatürk’s image as a bridge between “the personal and the political, embodying legacy and authority while reflecting systems of power and tradition.” The point lands visually: lingering shots of flags flutter beside prayer beads, each a talisman of competing identities.
You can feel the country’s cultural fault line vibrating through the mise-en-scène. The call to prayer cuts across sterile modern interiors; the glow of LED light on concrete replaces candlelight yet still feels devotional. The film captures that chronic tension between Turkey’s Western-leaning elite and its resurgent piety, between Atatürk’s secular modernism and the provincial pull of sanctimonius faith.
The father’s command, “Kill the light,” which book-ends the film, distils this conflict. It is more than a colloquialism: it’s a small linguistic assassination of enlightenment itself.
When the mid-film rupture arrives, the disorientation is total. Khatami intends this as an embodiment of what he calls “how we mirror the very things we’re trying to escape.” But the effect is less psychological than metaphysical. It collapses identity, echoing the confusion many societies face today: who are we, how are we seen, and what does either mean when every moral coordinate has dissolved?
Where others see “trauma,” you sense a broader dislocation; ontological vertigo rather than personal pain. The film’s meta-construction mirrors the global feeling of living after too many crises: pandemics, wars, ecological dread. It is not simply about fathers and sons; it is about institutions and their exhausted heirs.
The film’s motifs of wells, drowning, ghosts, and excavation, reach back to Turkish cinematic lineage. One thinks of Metin Erksan’s Susuz Yaz (1963), where water becomes both desire and corruption, a theme explicitly discussed in the film and not hidden behind metaphor and symbolism. Khatami’s wells ooze a metaphor: every attempt to bury the past seeps upward again. As he explains, “When characters try to bury things, whether secrets or bodies, they always seem to resurface, like water finding its way up through the earth,” echoing Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’.
It’s no accident that The Things You Kill looks most beautiful when contemplating still water or arid plains. Cinematographer Bartosz Świniarski frames Anatolia as a moral desert, recalling Once Upon a Time in Anatolia in its topographical melancholy. Light and dust perform what the script often overstates.
Koç, recently acclaimed for Burning Days, brings a raw physicality that cuts through the conceptual fog. His stillness, rather than his dialogue, communicates guilt. Opposite him, veteran Ercan Kesal (fittingly, a producer as well as actor) exudes weary menace. Hazar Ergüçlü’s Hazar grounds the film’s emotional realism; her line,“It’s easier to be angry and pretend you care,”pierces the philosophical murk and recalls Khatami’s own reflection that anger “is a shield against having to look at who we are.”
Technically, the film is immaculate. Benjamin Laurent’s sound design renders silence as tension, and Selda Taşkın’s editing, co-credited to Khatami, maintains an unnerving stillness even when time fractures.
But the film’s deliberate disorientation cuts both ways. What begins as bold form soon curdles into mannerism. The actor swaps, the recursive imagery, the quasi-Lynchian time loops all risk reading as academic demonstrations rather than discoveries. Khatami sometimes mistakes opacity for depth, but perhaps that is a nod to Ali’s own Western academic bent.
Still, that arrogance feels earned. This is a director willing to frustrate his audience to show how meaning itself has fractured. The film denies catharsis not out of incompetence but conviction. “We’ve examined these issues through an external political lens,” Khatami says, “but it’s time to turn that lens inward.” That is precisely what he does and turns the camera on the viewer until self and subject blur. Indeed the film is book-ended with two shots where Ali is literally blurred.
In the end, Ali’s descent mirrors more than the reductive observation from other critics of generational trauma; it mirrors a civilisation’s exhaustion. Turkey becomes the stand-in for everywhere, Western or Eastern, where enlightenment has curdled into nostalgia and faith has metastasised into identity politics.
The Things You Kill offers no catharsis, only reflection. It does not heal or explain; it lingers, like a moral residue. Khatami’s film finally stops asking who killed whom and begins asking what we killed in ourselves to lose our sense of self .
The Things You Kill premiered at Sundance 2025, and is released November 14.
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