Included in the offerings of this year’s Asian World Film Festival Los Angeles is The Things that You Kill, by Iranian director Alireza Khatami. This unnerving character study that often borders on thriller territory, The Things You Kill is a psychologically intense piece of genre filmmaking. On its surface, this disquieting diptych about male anxiety has the feel of an Asghar Farhadi movie, a moral dilemma urging forth a thriller plot. But that’s precisely the sort of bait-and-switch Iranian writer/director Alireza Khatami is operating on here, until his tense and nightmarish film starts to resemble more something like David Lynch’s Lost Highway as directed by Abbas Kiarostami.
Shot in Turkey mostly in Turkish, this is latest work of Iranian-born Canadian filmmaker Khatami. Interestingly enough, the film was financed in Canada and is Canada’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. Turkey does not support non-Turkish film directors. The film premiered at Sundance 2025, earlier this year.
The Things You Kill is a film about doubles that primarily concerns two characters in two locations that symbolically become one. Tellingly, in fact, this begins with the recounting of a dream. The Turkish-born Ali (Ekin Koç) listens to his wife, Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), recall a vision of his father. In her dream, his dad knocks at their door; his face is so exhausted it’s beyond description; he tells Hazar to “kill the lights.” By the end, it’s a nightmare Ali will also experience, but with a grimmer context.
Alireza Khatami builds his tale with great precision – focusing his tale on Ali (Ekin Koç), a translation professor at the university whose sudden brush with tragedy and his long odds of having a family cause him to dramatically react against his vicious father. Director Khatami uses his protagonist to examine piercing generational masculine violence, the toll of emasculation, and the pain of otherness with an openness that leaves one quite stunned.
Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami returns to solo directing after making the Iran-set film Terrestrial Verses (2023), which was comprised of fierce political vignettes, alongside Ali Asgari. In that film, the intriguing narrative examines how a single person holds multiple identities within themselves, emerging depending on the situation they face. It’s as if an individual spoke a unique language with each person in their life, translating themselves to adapt to every context. Everyone, to an extent, is a personality polyglot.
Ali doesn’t know it yet, but he is in turmoil. When he visits his mother, who can only get around the house via her walker, he discovers her toilet is clogged and there’s a gun wrapped in a towel in her septic tank. Upon visiting a fertility clinic, he’s diagnosed with a low sperm count that’ll make the possibility of fathering a child negligible. At his second tiny home in the desert, he struggles to tend his arid garden with struggling fruit trees.
The story threads become tightly intertwined when Ali’s mother passes away. Grief-stricken, he turns his ire toward his apathetic, often menacing father (Ercan Kesal). At Ali’s lowest point, Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a gardener, arrives at his desert home promising that he can revive the land. Before long, Reza’s malicious influence is acutely felt, causing the once gentle Ali to not only turn to violence but also to engage in an anger so potent that it quite literally causes Ali to lose his identity.
Heady as that concept sounds, The Things You Kill grounds its thesis on the familial conflicts that afflict Ali and slowly unspools them to serve as illustrations for the ideas at play. For one, Ali worries about his ill mother’s safety living with his forbidding and absent father, Hamit (Ercan Kesal).
At the same time, his veterinarian wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) pushes him to seek reproductive healthcare as they’ve struggled to conceive. Amid the quotidian turmoil, Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a wanderer looking for work, shows up at Ali’s garden in the remote countryside. Ali hires Reza to look after the vegetation, which sparks a strange friendship between the two disparate men. Like a mirage, an enigmatic gardener enters the frame with a proposition Ali can’t refuse, or maybe willed into being himself. The gardener seems to already have a penchant for tall tales, with a notebook full of scribbles and an English-language paperback he’s reading. And are those Ali’s clothes he’s suddenly wearing? The Anatolian mountains, where Ali tends to a barren garden, provide a sinister backdrop from which anything, not just a vagabond dropped as if from the sky, can suddenly appear.
Long-suppressed, Ali’s resentment towards his father fully emerges after his mother’s sudden death. The more information he unearths about what transpired in his 14-year absence from Turkey, the more he becomes consumed with rage. The people he thought he knew now seem like strangers. In playing Ali, a searing Koç keeps his seething thirst for retribution underneath contained exasperation and disbelief, which effectively contrasts the macho rogue confidence in Köstendil’s imposing turn as Reza. The pairing creates a type of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde relationship. Even as viewers become aware of the dichotomy that rules over The Things You Kill, Kathami cleverly expands its meaning with each revelation.
Reza and Ali share more than a passing resemblance. So, it doesn’t take much effort for Reza to chain Ali like a dog at his desert home and take Ali’s place. Unlike Ali, Reza is dangerous and misogynistic, morally corrupt and prone to outbursts. In his taking over of Ali’s life, an earlier scene bears importance: Ali teaches his translation class that the etymology of the word “translation” differs greatly between Latin and Akkadian. In the former language, it means to transfer meaning; in the latter, it can mean to stone or destroy. Through Reza, are we watching a translation of Ali’s true self or his destruction? Are the grisly events we are witnessing – such as the disappearance of Ali’s father – part of reality or the playing out of Ali’s deepest desires.
The Things You Kill is an astutely written exercise in paying attention to how one is perceived and using that knowledge to rewrite one’s own narrative. For another woman, Hamit can be the loving husband he wasn’t with Ali’s mother. The new girlfriend only knows the tender version of himself he’s created for her. By the same token, Ali and his sister grew up with a positive image of their grandfather because Hamit omitted how his father raised him. In killing the past, and with it the truth, either by taking on a new demeanor or by keeping secrets, a transformation takes place. Having children is also understood as a second try at life here – an opportunity to start anew indirectly. Ali worries, however, that becoming a parent could mean repeating his dad’s shortcomings.
That Khatami made this feature in Turkey, a country he’s not originally from, comes off as thematically in sync with his body of work; his 2017 debut feature Oblivion Verses is a Spanish-language magical realist tale shot in Chile. The central concept of The Things You Kills applies sharply to Khatami’s filmmaking. What kind of artist is he when working in Turkish or Spanish, and who does he become or revert back to when creating in his native Persian? That’s a query one could pose to anyone who has left their homeland for an international setting.
The twist after a shocking act violence in the middle of the film reads like the materialization of Ali’s desire to be a bolder, more stereotypically masculine iteration of himself. That the main character is named Ali and the gardener that eventually usurps his reality is called Reza speaks of two souls existing inside one body, as the director’s first name is the amalgamation of these two names: Alireza. That somewhat conspicuous detail seems to evince the profoundly personal relationship between the creation and the writer – as Khatami explained in the Q&A after the screening. For him, this is a personal film that, in some ways, reflects his own experience with his father in Iran and why he left the country years ago.
The Things You Kill ends with the same enigmatic line – “kill the light” – spoken by two very different people. One is born from a dream, the other a nightmare, and they form the beginning and end of an existential death sentence around the hapless Ali (Ekin Koç). Khatami brilliantly does here is spike those tracks with landmines that implode all the way to that final, dying line: “Kill the light.” You can’t stop what’s coming, and what’s coming is worse than you thought.
