You'll never be free of The Things You Kill in this twisty, tense thriller
Seeing one’s true self is the key to The Things You Kill, a heady family drama/crime thriller from writer-director Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses). It’s a film built upon stacked facades, each giving way to another feeble delusion as the pressure mounts. Like those in any good psychological twister, these facades are scrupulously maintained, preciously guarded, as they prevent the vulnerable truth from being exposed to the world. Khatami’s methodical film excavates these fragile artifacts with quiet care and an elliptical trust in his audience’s enraptured attention.
Shot against breathtaking Anatolian vistas and featuring an excellent Turkish ensemble, the slick and cerebral film starts spinning apart when a family’s elderly matriarch dies in the middle of the night. She was old and ailing, yes, but her college professor son Ali (Ekin Koç) had also recently learned that his burly, callous father (Ercan Kesal) had been abusive over the course of their marriage. Was her death really just the result of natural causes? And can, or should, anything be done depending on the answer to that question? These thoughts haunt her son as deeply as her memory, while the rest of her children, Ali’s sisters, would rather quietly move things along—not forgetting per se, just glossing over the facts they’d prefer not to know, until time buries them alongside their parents.
These women are more readily able to sit with uncomfortable complexities, more conditioned to weather the revealed cruelties underneath everyday truths. “Agony seems reserved solely for women,” one of Ali’s sisters tells him. But for the stifled Ali, this impotent uncertainty begets violence—the terrifyingly familiar trajectory of threatened masculinity. It’s no surprise when Ali brings his suspicions around his mother’s death to his mysterious gardener Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil). Reza just wanders up one day under the hot sun asking for water and employment, his qualifications as opaque as his confidence. But it’s enough for Ali. Together, they hatch a scheme to get revenge, if not the truth.
Before this, though, the way The Things You Kill walks through the mundane responsibilities and indignities of caring for a parent, and the friction between family members, establishes the kind of quiet (and dry humor) found at the beginnings of the best horror movies. Ali’s domestic and professional lives—his furtive fertility issues with his veterinarian wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) and his flirtations with one of his translation students at the university—bleed into one another, and in doing so, highlight the cracks that could easily turn to fissures with just a bit more external pressure. His mother’s death, and the revelations about his father, are just the catalysts he doesn’t need.