Turkish Drama Premieres at Sundance

Writer-director Alireza Khatami is known for a pair of semi-experimental dramas — 2017’s Oblivion Verses and 2023’s Terrestrial Verses (co-directed with Ali Asgari) — where he constantly toys with storytelling techniques, inserting flashes of surreal imagery without warning, or relying on a mysteriously oblique viewpoint to narrate the action. If the content of his films skews towards the dark side, their form tends to be a bit more playful, undercutting some of the heaviness of what’s being depicted.

In The Things You Kill, the brooding tale of a college professor facing major upheavals on two home fronts gets belied by a plot that slides into violent absurdity. What starts off as a staid and naturalistic drama, about a man experiencing a midlife crisis following the death of his mother, veers into Buñuel or De Palma territory in the latter half. Identities are swapped, bodies are dropped and everything seems out of whack. That is, until Khatami tries to tie things together without much explanation.

The film is essentially divided into two parts. In the first, we follow the quotidian travails of Ali (Ekin Koç), a translation teacher who lived in the U.S. for years and has returned home to work in his native Turkey, where he gives classes part-time job at a public university. Married to svelte veterinarian Hazar (Hazar Ergüclü), with whom he’s been desperately trying to have a baby, Ali learns two pivotal things early on: his sperm count is seriously low, and his aging mother can no longer take care of herself.

The parallel plotlines involving Ali’s possible descendants and problematic antecedents, including a father (Ercan Kesal) who seems to be particularly abusive towards his wife, collide in highly unusual ways during the movie’s volatile second half. At that point, a wayfarer named Reza (Erkan Koçak Köstendil) pops into the picture, showing up at Ali’s cabin in the hills outside town and offering up his services as a gardener. But as we soon learn, Reza does much more than simply water the plants.

If the opening half hour of The Things You Kill plays out like a slow-burn family saga reminiscent of the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Kesal is a regular collaborator of the Turkish auteur) it lacks dramatic staying power and drags along at times. Movie protagonists don’t always have to be likable, but Ali is so much of a pretentious curmudgeon that his fall from grace, which includes the news he may lose his teaching job due to budget cuts, doesn’t exactly move us. He treats everyone with an undercurrent of disdain, and seems to regret moving back to Turkey after what seemed like a more fruitful life in America.

It’s therefore somewhat of a relief to see the professor get put through the wringer in the latter half of the narrative, when, following his mother’s sudden death and the suspicions that his father may be responsible, The Things You Kill jaggedly shifts into thriller mode. Without spoiling too much, let’s just say that Ali and Reza — two names that, when joined together, spell the director’s own first name — decide to take matters into their own hands, leading to a bloody denouement with echoes of both James M. Cain and the Coen brothers. The drama does eventually come full circle, but it’s gone so far off the rails by that point that it’s hard to bring us back.

Like in his previous work, Khatami defies convention here, and that’s very much to his credit. The early scenes of The Things You Kill presage a quiet chamber piece, which the director completely upends once the murder story takes over. He also reveals a deft eye for composition, framing characters through windows or doorways to better underline the film-within-a-film aspects of the narrative, and leaving us to wonder: Are we witnessing reality, or some kind of movie that’s playing inside Ali’s head?

As much as that can make for an intriguingly deconstructed viewing experience, emotionally speaking the film remains a bit stale. Khatami certainly has a lot to say, especially about the crushing effects of the male hierarchy on both a personal and professional level. But there’s something about The Things You Kill that ultimately leaves the viewer cold, even if all the strange and awful stuff Ali goes through leads him to finally open up and, perhaps, lighten up.