THE STORY – Haunted by the suspicious death of his ailing mother, a university professor coerces his enigmatic gardener to execute a cold-blooded act of vengeance.
THE CAST – Selen Kurtaran, Idil Engindeniz, Güliz Şirinyan & Aysan Sümercan Ölmez
THE TEAM – Alireza Khatami (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
After working with Iranian Director Ali Asgari on their Cannes sensation “Terrestrial Verses,” Alireza Khatami returns to the director’s chair with his latest directorial project. With “The Things You Kill,” Khatami ditches the vignette structure of his previous collaborative endeavor with a singular three-act dissection of masculinity and generational violence. Instead of shooting his feature within the bustling patriarchal streets of Tehran, Khatami sets his narrative in the cosmopolitan malaise of Ankara. Originally, Khatami’s treatment of his screenplay was written in Farsi, with the intention of shooting the film within Iran. However, after Iranian censorship authorities demanded rewrites of the script, Khatami rejected the state’s creative tampering.
Instead, Khatami shot the film in Turkey due to his personal ties with a Turkish-speaking indigenous tribe in Iran. With funding from Poland, France, and Canada backing the film’s production, Kahtami’s political voice was able to return to the international film festival circuit, even with his initial creative limitations. In this feature, Khatami focuses on the quotidian struggles of Ali, a literature professor whose academic career is in jeopardy due to institutional budget cuts. His insecurities are magnified as Khatami’s story languidly shelters its viewer within his protagonist’s unreliable periphery.
The film spotlights each of his numbing actions, from minor microaggressions to tough conversations regarding his ability to conceive. After the sudden passing of his mother, Khatami’s film begins to disseminate within Ali’s headspace. The congregations with his family ultimately reveal the darker truths of his upbringing. Whereas the inclusion of testimonies and conversations with his family unit help flesh out the depth of Ali’s obfuscated morality, “The Things You Kill” prominently focuses on the protagonist’s marital status. Instead of expanding on Ali’s relationship with his sisters, the film moves away from his family to reiterate the character’s pursuit of parenthood. Whereas the paternal subplot is necessary to explore Ali’s relationship with his father and growing concerns about his fertility, the film’s narrative regrettably neglects the integration of Ali’s relationship with his sisters.
The same issues regarding conventionality persist within the film’s editorial form. Alireza Khatami and Selda Taşkın’s didactic picture edit communicates Ali’s instability through cold and calculated cutting. Khatami relies on hard cuts and minimal coverage to resemble the apathetic realities of Ali’s maternal grief. However, despite the initial effectiveness of its rudimentary techniques, the editorial methodology lacks creative vigor that goes beyond its minimalist execution. In an attempt to delve deeper into the inner psyche of the film’s protagonist, the film’s repetitive hard-cutting interrupts the progression of its storytelling.
In return, the obviousness of its centralized themes is enforced through key visual props. Khatami includes mirrors as a critical visual motif illustrating Ali’s internal conflict. The motif generates a strong sense of dissonance, personifying the protagonist’s familial reckoning through impressive camera coordination. The film dissects the ripple effects of the patriarchy from the perspective of one man’s rejection of his father’s misdeeds. In collaboration with his cinematographer Bartosz Swiniarski, Khatami skillfully plays with the mechanics of cinema to differentiate stages of the protagonist’s psychological well-being. In a scene that occurs minutes before the film’s harrowing finale, Khatami’s composition frames Ali out of focus. In a moment of revelation, Swiniarski’s cinematography gently stabilizes the image, revealing the entirety of Ali’s visage. A literal return to clarity dictates Ali’s comfortability in discussing his familial trauma.
The title of the film, “The Things You Kill”, behaves as a double entendre; carrying dual meanings and various interpretations regarding the film’s web of intricate themes. As the names of the film’s protagonist and its self-reflexive antagonist emerge from the origin of Khatami’s first name, “The Things You Kill” works as sufficient self-exorcism that never relies on gratuitous violence nor sensationalism to examine its provocative implications. The slow-moving pace lulls the viewer into Ali’s psyche, capturing his world through impressively blocked master shots. Technical proficiency aside, Khatami’s film is an introspective character study that loses its thematic allure due to its inconsistent subplots and repetitive editing conventions.
