THE THINGS YOU KILL: 4 STARS. “finely crafted study of vengeance and identity.”
SYNOPSIS: In “The Things You Kill,” a new thriller now playing in theatres from award winning director Alireza Khatami, a Turkish university professor seeks vengeance in the death of his mother.
CAST: Ekin Koç, Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, Hazar Ergüçlü, Ercan Kesal. Directed by Alireza Khatami.
REVIEW: A thriller that also works as a character study, “The Things You Kill” is finely crafted study of grief, vengeance and identity.
Ekin Koç plays Ali, a university literature professor whose life is slowly spiralling downwards. Uneasy about keeping his low fertility diagnosis a secret from his wife and an unstable work life, he’s driven to the edge by the suspicious death of his mother, an elderly woman disabled after being beaten years before by Ali’s domineering father Hamit (Ercan Kesal).
When his mother is found, face down in her home, with the doors locked, Ali suspects foul play. Haunted by grief, his personal investigation into his mother’s passing leads him to lay the blame for her death at his father’s feet.
Shattered and filled with vengeance, Ali hires his gardener Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) to kidnap and kill Hamit.
No spoilers here but suffice to say that what follows is a look at how repression can manifest itself in increasingly existential ways.
“The Things You Kill” takes a big swing mid-movie. Accept it, and the film opens up, revealing a morality play disguised as an Hitchcockian story of the horrors of losing control of one’s life. It may ask more questions than it answers, but the study of intergenerational trauma and inherited violence elevates what could have been a standard story of revenge.
It’s a bold movie that challenges audience expectations. Instead of offering easy answers to the film’s questions, director Alireza Khatami favors ambiguity, dream-like sequences and elliptical storytelling. Engaged viewers will find much to chew on here as the story develops from family drama and revenge to darker and more surreal.
The spectre of David Lynch hangs heavy over “The Things You Kill” in its ability to challenge the audience’s perceptions of what a revenge movie can be by infusing a well know genre with riddles and feverish metaphors that allow for viewer interpretation.
“The Things That Kill” you is a rarity, a cerebral story of vengeance that embraces the tropes of the genre and then subverts them with clever filmmaking.
