‘The Things You Kill’ Review – The Weight He Can’t Carry

Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill is one of those films that takes a little patience before it really reveals what it’s doing. The opening stretch is quiet in a way that risks losing you, too subdued, almost emotionally locked in. But there’s a purpose to that stillness. Once the film starts peeling back the layers of its protagonist, Ali, a university professor whose carefully controlled life starts to cave in, you realize the slowness isn’t hesitation. It’s pressure. A slow tightening. And eventually, something snaps.

Ali, played with a kind of tightly wound fragility by Ekin Koç, is not someone who wears his emotions on the surface. He’s Turkish-born, working in the U.S., dealing with career anxiety after academic budget cuts shake his confidence. There’s already a bruise under the skin long before the story’s main catalyst arrives. And when news comes that his mother has died back in Turkey under circumstances that don’t quite add up, that bruise becomes a fracture. The film watches him stumble through that grief in ways that feel uncomfortably close, especially when he starts fixating on old wounds involving his father, masculinity, fertility, and the creeping fear that he might be repeating cycles he spent his life trying to outrun.

What’s interesting about The Things You Kill is that the plot summary makes it sound almost sensational, “professor coerces gardener into killing people” has a pulpy, thriller snap to it—but the movie itself is far more internal than that. Reza, the gardener (played with understated menace by Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), isn’t introduced as some stock figure ready to do violent favors; he’s lonely, tired, and drifting, and his connection to Ali is unsettling precisely because it grows out of shared vulnerability rather than any clear moral shift. When Ali nudges him toward violence, it’s less a mastermind manipulating someone and more a desperate man projecting his own unresolved fury onto the one person who doesn’t push back.

The film is at its strongest when it sinks into Ali’s private unraveling. Khatami has a sharp eye for character introspection–real introspection, not the melodramatic kind where someone stares out a window while sad music plays. Here, the camera sits with Ali in mirrors, in cramped doorways, and lets his insecurities creep to the surface. The camera blocking is deliberate and often striking; there are scenes where Ali looks split down the middle or boxed in by the frame, and those choices quietly underline everything he’s not saying aloud.

But despite how well-crafted the film is, and it often is, there are sections where the editing starts to work against the storytelling. Not in a stylistic, “let the audience feel disoriented” sense, but in a messy, interruptive way. Transitions feel abrupt. A few emotional beats land with less weight simply because the film cuts away before they’ve had time to breathe. There’s one storyline in particular, involving Ali’s sisters, that feels introduced with intention, only to be completely dropped. And it’s a shame, because those early moments hint at deeper emotional terrain, something that would’ve helped round out the family trauma the film wants to examine. Their absence leaves a hollow spot that you keep feeling in the later acts.

Khatami’s filmmaking is confident, and the craft is undeniable. But The Things You Kill never becomes as gripping or as thought-provoking as it clearly wants to be. The themes of grief, masculinity, and inherited violence are all present, sometimes beautifully rendered, but the emotional impact ebbs and flows. You feel the depth of Ali’s pain, yet the movie doesn’t always manage to structure that pain into something dramatically cohesive. It’s more like watching someone drown in slow motion: haunting, but occasionally too distant.

Still, Koç’s performance gives the film an anchor. He plays Ali not as a tragic hero but as a man who doesn’t know how to carry his own history. His scenes with Reza have an eerie softness to them, the kind that makes you lean forward because you’re not quite sure which direction the dynamic is heading. And when Ali finally hits a moment of clarity near the end, it doesn’t feel like an epiphany so much as exhaustion—the acceptance that he can’t keep running from what he’s inherited, and that something inside him has to be confronted or destroyed.

Even though it doesn’t fully land every idea, you can feel the care put into it. The Things You Kill is well-crafted, introspective, and flawed in ways that sometimes frustrate but often feel true to the messy emotional territory it’s working in. It’s not as sharp or as piercing as it aims to be, but it’s a film that is definitely hard to forget and one you will remember for a long time after watching.

The Things You Kill is currently playing in select theaters in New York courtesy of Cineverse. The film will expand to Los Angeles and additional markets on November 21st. The film is Canada’s selection for the 98th Academy Awards.