Near the beginning of The Things You Kill, Ali’s partner Hazar tells him about a dream she had. She’s at the home of Ali’s parents — it’s nighttime, the home is empty of all the furniture and no one is there. When she hears a banging on the front door, she opens it to see Ali’s father, bloodied and bruised, waiting to be let in as dogs barking fill the nighttime air. It’s a surreal image, one that will be brought back later in the film to great effect.

The Things You Kill is a slyly unsettling drama, patient in the unraveling of its story about idenтιтy, fatherhood, and revenge. Though it’s quiet in its execution, the film deftly flips the script to undermine everything you thought you knew about Ali, his family, and the world around them.

The Things You Kill Will Get Under Your Skin

It’s An Effective, Surreal Drama

Ali, who has recently returned to Turkey, is trying for a baby with his partner Hazar while helping take care of his ailing mother, who, it is implied, has been abused by her husband and Ali’s father, Hamit. When his mother dies, Ali immediately suspects his father may have had something to do with it. They trade barbs as they mourn, Hamit’s aggression clear.

Ali is much more docile than his father or sisters, and he is slowly being crushed by the idea of fatherhood from all angles. He and Hazar are struggling to conceive due to his low sperm count, something he doesn’t reveal to his partner. His father’s oppressive behavior is a source of deep trauma for Ali. The founding father of Turkey quite literally hangs over the entrance to the school where he works in the form of a mᴀssive flag.

Ali avoids all of this by tending to his family’s garden on the outskirts of the city when, out of the arid, dusty landscape, arrives a stranger named Reza. This stranger is everything Ali is not — abrasive, unafraid of what Ali thinks of him, and willing to push others to get what he wants, including a job on the family’s property. When Reza helps Ali take revenge against his father, it will lead him down a path of psychological torment that forces Ali to confront everything he’s been so desperately trying to avoid.

It’d be easy for The Things You Kill to transform into something obvious, but writer-director Alireza Khatami matter-of-factly treats pivotal moments, creating a disorienting feeling that never lets you fully gain your footing. Ali and Reza have more in common than is initially clear and the dual idenтιтies at the center of the film echo those of his father.

It brings into question whether we can truly separate ourselves from the terrible things that have been done to us and the terrible things we do in return. The Things You Kill may seem like a simple revenge drama, but it allows itself to be so much more through form and story. In one key scene towards the end of the film, Ali explains to someone at the university why he chose to study in America.

The camera is locked on Ali’s face, but the focus is such that there’s a slight blur during this monologue, almost as if the events Ali is recounting didn’t happen to him, or at least who he is at that moment. We never truly know what we are capable of until we are forced to confront the worst parts of ourselves and, for Ali, there’s both relief and terror in finding out who he truly is and what he’ll do to protect what he loves.

The Things You Kill premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.