In The Things You Kill (Turkey, Canada, France, Poland | 2025 | 113 min), selected in international competition at the 46th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) and presented by Canada for the Oscar for Best International Film, director Alireza Khatami deploys a work of rare emotional density, on the border of psychological drama and existential thriller. Known for Oblivion Verseswhich already examined the scars of collective memory, Alireza Khatami continues here her reflection on filiation, guilt and transmission – but this time in a tighter framework, centered on her father, her mother, a house and a past which resurfaces.
Ali, a literature professor who settled in Turkey after years in the United States, leads a seemingly peaceful life, between his university classes and the garden he carefully cultivates. He gives the impression of having turned the page on his childhood, marked by an authoritarian father and a silent mother. However, when she dies in circumstances that we suspect are troubled, everything he thought was over comes to the surface: the return to his maternal home begins under the sign of strangeness, of contained tension, and soon, the presence of Reza, a mysterious gardener hired by Ali, comes to upset this crumbly balance. Reza is not a simple employee; he is the witness, even the double, in which Ali begins to recognize the unexplored areas of his own history.
Alireza Khatami structures her story as a slow descent towards the truth. The film advances through delicate reminiscences, through objects that speak of the shadows, through gestures that betray unsaid things. Every detail brings Ali back to his relationship with his mother, but also to the father figure he rejects while carrying his legacy. The central tension is there: between tenderness and violence, between the desire to love and the fear of repeating the mistakes of the past.
The dimension of the film deepens further when we learn that Ali, in the midst of his attempts at fatherhood, assumes his own responsibility towards the future. This desire to become a father gives a symbolic charge to everything he faces: not only is it a question of understanding his past, but above all of preventing it from happening again. As he gets closer to the truth about his mother’s death, he becomes aware of the danger of transmission – not only biological, but psychological, emotional, symbolic. The film then becomes a dialogue between generations: this violent father whom he was unable to love, this mother whom he was unable to save, and this child whom he is preparing to welcome into a world where violence – whether physical or symbolic – is omnipresent.
Revenge, if we can call it that, is not aimed at a specific person but targets a system of domination and silence. Ali confronts male violence, institutional, rooted in culture and which he discovers in himself. Through this journey, Alireza Khatami questions what it means to be a man in a world where strength often rhymes with brutality, and where sensitivity is perceived as weakness. The cultivated teacher, the loving son, the rational citizen that is Ali discovers that he is not free from the transmission of violence. What he “kills” or tries to kill are the reflexes of a generations-old patriarchy, the wounds inflicted on the women of his family, the guilt of not having known how to intervene.
Visually, the film achieves an almost hypnotic rigor. Alireza Khatami films the family home as a mental space: each room, each corridor carries a memory. The camera lingers on a simple gesture, a heavy silence. The lights are dimmed, the clarity filtered as if the truth could only appear in halftones. Nature, omnipresent, becomes the echo of the inner drama. The garden, the symbolic heart of the work, has become a place of labor but also of rebirth: Ali digs the earth there, buries his fears there, and perhaps attempts purification. Reza, in this context, is not a simple gardener’s helper: he embodies a tacit wisdom, a lucidity that the hero struggles to achieve.
The strength of The Things You Kill also lies in his ability to articulate the intimate and the political. Without descending into a manifesto, the film questions how society shapes male behavior and perpetuates invisible violence. The death of the mother becomes a symbolic trigger: it releases a long-contained word, but also reveals the immense difficulty in breaking with inherited patterns. Khatami does not moralize; he observes, slowly and precisely, the contradictions of a man torn between love and shame, between memory and forgetting.
Ekin Koç’s performance in the role of Ali is poignantly sober; his gaze, often fixed, expresses more than his words. He carries dull guilt, but also a restrained tenderness. Opposite him, the presence of Erkan Kolçak Köstendil – playing Reza – gives the whole thing an almost metaphysical dimension: their exchanges, sometimes discreet, turn into symbolic clashes between conscience and denial, between lucidity and obedience. Khatami’s direction, spare but meticulous, gives these exchanges an almost sacred tension.
During its final moments, the film transcends simple realism. The boundaries between reality and memory dissolve. What the viewer sees is perhaps no longer the outside world but the mental landscape of a man in search of peace. The Things You Kill then transforms into a meditation on responsibility, on the possibility of freeing oneself without denying what one has been. The title, loaded with multiple meanings, suggests that what we destroy – in us or around us – ends up defining us.
Alireza Khatami here signs a film of great coherence, both sensory and cerebral, poetic and political. He films pain as learning, guilt as a necessary passage towards lucidity. The Things You Kill is a demanding work, which asks the viewer to immerse themselves in it, to dig with Ali into the silent layers of the unsaid. And when the truth is finally revealed, it brings neither appeasement nor redemption, but an acute awareness of what it means to live with what one has “killed” — in oneself, in others, or in history.
Neila Driss
