Drama/Thriller • 14A • 114 Minutes • 2025
This Review contains some spoilers.
The Things You Kill, written and directed by Alireza Khatami (lock in this name, it’ll come back), is a confounding and symbolism-heavy film asking tough questions about the duality of violence. Similar to Internal Family Systems therapy, Khatami manages to separate the personalities of Ali into two distinct and separate people. Ask yourself: can a man hold two competing subpersonalities? A caring and faithful husband, trying with his wife to become a father, but also a killer, wrapping fear and hate so tightly around his heart, he might as well be another person?
In Ankara, Turkey, Ali (Ekin Koç), a professor of literature, is continually disturbed by his mother Sakine’s (Güliz Sirinyan) living conditions and her rapid health decline. Blaming his father, Hamit (Ercan Kesal), as negligent, consequently, both Hamit and Ali have a strained relationship, which is further challenged when Sakine is found dead in their home. Suspecting Hamit had killed her, Ali meets Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), a wanderer whom Ali hires to work on his farm on the rural outskirts of town and together they devise a plan to kill Hamit in retribution.
Now, you might be wondering how a film shot in Turkey and featuring an international cast can be considered a Canadian film. While writer/director Alireza Khatami is Iranian, he lives and works in Toronto and is on his way to becoming a Canadian citizen, according to playbackonline.ca. Before you get up in arms over Telefilm using your tax dollars to finance foreign films, understand that Canada’s footprint on this film is tiny, but important. Telefilm Canada has international treaties and memorandums with nearly sixty countries around the world, with a focus on bringing more productions to Canada. While Canada’s investment into The Things You Kill was only around twenty percent (the smallest of all the other coproductions; Turkey, France, and Poland), post-production was partially moved from Europe to Urban Post Production, a company based in Toronto.
There is a lot going on in this film that the synopsis doesn’t get close to covering, and something I’m not going to fully spoil. However, for the puzzle-solvers out there, you may have noticed that two of the characters, Ali and Reza, are two parts of the writer/director’s first name, Alireza Khatami (I told you it would come back). The deep introspection of violence and grief is the driving force behind the film. Khatami uses that juxtaposition between his two characters, Ali and Reza, who, after the disturbing climax of the film, essentially switch lives; Reza effectively stealing Ali’s identity. And no one notices? During my first watch, I was confused by this, only to finish with the realization that “Oh, they’re the same person.” Then it all came together: the names, the Lynchian disconnect, and dream sequences. It’s all there for you to figure out through the exploration of one man, with a loving wife and a job he enjoys and fights for, and on the other side of the spectrum, harbours horrendous acts of violence.
Across the board, all performances are simply great. Each actor understood their roles precisely. Ekin Koç excels at bringing the full range of human emotion to the toughest scenes. Most memorably, as Ali drives away from his father’s murder with Reza. Koç works with shame, nervousness, fear, and regret all at once, bleeding each emotion into a Venn diagram of human emotion. Erkan Kolçak Köstendil’s character, Reza, on the other hand, has the opposite task. He must model himself after Ali to blur the lines of reality as he takes Ali’s identity and inserts himself into Ali’s life, navigating his family, work, and hardships without giving an inch of his former self. It’s a kind of performance that holds the film together in its dream-like haze and carries the film for nearly half its runtime. Other performances by Güliz Sirinyan as Sakine, Ercan Kesal as Hamit, and Hazar Ergüçlü as Ali’s wife, Hazar, sharing the same name as her character, are equally as top-notch as their importance can’t go understated. Each character is as integral to the next, in terms of plot and character development. While there are few female characters in the film, the women in this film present an interesting and no less important role. Hazar encourages Ali to open up to her and help him maneuver through the grief of the death of his mother. In contrast, Ali’s sister Nesrin (Selen Kurtaran) offers another type of support by informing Ali of their father’s history of violence. However, due to Ali’s persistence and fractured mindset, he is the one who makes his choices, regardless of the balanced support around him.
The Things You Kill is a fascinating and introspective film, written with earnest self-exploration about two competing subpersonalities, one expressed through violence and one through grief, that, far too often, are stripped of nuance and are regarded as binary. While some scenes drag and are steeped in metaphor after metaphor, underneath the praise, The Things You Kill is not the easiest to sit through and can require more investigation into many of its themes than some may want. Yet, it’s the performances that overshadow many of the pacing issues and kept me locked in, waiting to see what was going to happen next, who was really dead, and the feeling that in this world, there are no rules, and anything could happen.
The Things You Kill (Öldürdügün Seyler) is nominated for three Canadian Screen Awards.
Where to Watch
The Things You Kill (Öldürdügün Seyler) was rented on AppleTV.
Also worth checking: CBC Gem (often carries Canadian titles not listed elsewhere).
about the author
Merrick Gajdics is founder, publisher and editor of The Canadian Film Reviewer.