The existential apocalypse of a Turkish literature professor gets an oblique and cooling study in “The things you kill. “On the surface, this worrying diptych about male anxiety has the feeling of, for example, an Asghar Farhadi film, a moral dilemma that urges a thriller plot. But this is precisely that kind of bete-and-switch Iranian writer/director Alireza Khatami works here, until his tense and nightmare film Starting to resemble more like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” as instructed by Abbas Kiarostami. Khatami (”Mark verse“), Who lives in Canada, the attitude from Iran moved to Turkey to avoid censorship in its home country – a censorship of patriarchal violence that the film also calls on as a warning clock for a bleak future.
“The things you kill“Ends with the same enigmatic line -” Kill the light ” – spoken by two very different people. One is carried from a dream, the other a nightmare, and they form the beginning and end of an existential death sentence around the unhappy Ali (Ekin Koç). He is in the early 1930s, handsome and married to a beautiful, 10-year-old veterinarian (Hazar Ergüçlü). But the cracks are starting to form. Somewhere in a Turkish city he teaches translated Western literature into an unaffected classroom, a course he is mocked for by administrators and one that is being interrupted the next semester. His low sperm prevents him from becoming pregnant a child despite his wife’s desperate desire to do so, just reminiscent the is the problem, the common denominator for all his misfortune. He has a tense relationship with his father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), who looks at his son and just sees disappointment. “What did I do as Allah gave me such a son?” His mother is meanwhile a geriatric wreck that needs attention on the clock.
Like the compulsive rotation of a pencil to a sharper, Khatami streams the narrative rope to a short -term effect with a series of ominous views. Plumbing seems to be busted everywhere, there is a gun hidden in a water tank, and a crucial mirror opens as a portal, seemingly sucking Ali in it. In a distant long time, no rush takes to zoom in – Khatami and Kinematographer Bartosz Swiniarski sometimes work with lenses that go in and out of focus to suggest that you wake up or come from a dream – Ali and his sisters Nesrin and Meriam gather around For the terrible for the terrible news. Their mother was found dead, with Hamit from the property at her case.
However, death is suspicious because an autopsy report reveals that she died of a bleeding caused by an unknown blunt trauma on the back of the head. But she fell with her face down? Hamit has a history of rage and abuse, which leads Ali down a darker path that, strange, in the end, ends up in his impotent life. In a society that benefits a patriarchal provider of one who cannot even phase a child, who cannot fulfill branch prophecy because of his own emotional stunt, Ali is an overall feckless man according to the standards of society. But if he can sort out the death of his mother and stifle the chain of patriarchal violence, one that he is now founded to pick up, at the roots, maybe he can save himself.
While “the things you kill” live on specific Muslim issues – the forced piety that can lead to a sleep walk in a life, is women who are pushed aside by society – Khatami is after a more universal effect here and challenges the perception that his story must be Muslim by introducing Western filmmaking methods and hints. Even while Khatami’s late beloved compatriot Kiarostami remains a real northern star.
Like a mirage, an enigmatic gardener (Erkan Kolçak Kötetendil) comes into the frame with a proposal that Ali cannot refuse, or may want to be himself. The gardener already seems to have a preference for high stories, with a notebook full of doodles and an English -language pocket book that he reads. And do they have Ali’s clothes that he suddenly wears? The Anatolian mountains, where Ali tends to a barren garden, gives an unfortunate background from which everything, not just a vagabond that is dropped as from heaven, can suddenly show up.
Here is when “The Things You Kill” kicks into higher, luminous gear. After a sudden and brutal act of violence, the film itself seems to be brained, a key decision member was changed and a version of Ali who now lives in an alternative reality that is very close to the film’s first half, but everything is just a bit of. Therefore, echoes from “Lost Highway”, where the character is played by Bill Pullman in David Lynch’s eerie primer on male violence is a change for Balthazar Getty during the second half. The comparisons with Abbas Kiarostami come in the self -conscious formalism of “the things you kill.” A LA Iranian director Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” – a tradition of non -linear filmmaking khatami is much more invested in than his contemporary countrymen – it would not be a shock for the film to cut to his own director and hold a camera. This film is about the infectious power of the story-which includes lies and self-deception-and what potentially deadly unit it may be wrong or even the right hands. And what is wrong or right happens? Khatami does not respond to any of it. While self -consciousness in style threatens to kill the emotional impact of history, khatami is not a particularly emotional filmmaker here. I would put him closer on the way to a horror leader.
“The things you kill” are like a bad, sweat-breaking dream that leaves you dazzled and feverish-and a black-hearted look in the poison patriarchy oozes in men’s veins as much as women. Ali, as a male feminist who is hip of that particular system, thinks he has calculated everything. But Ali also puts the tracks, and what Khatami brilliant does here is Spike the tracks with land mines that implore all the way to the last, dying line: “Kill the light.” You can’t stop what’s coming, and what’s getting worse than you thought.
Rating: A-
“The Things You Kill” premiered by 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution. Best friend Forever is to handle sales.
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