by Hudson Moura
The Things You Kill (dir. Alireza Khatami) is a rigorously composed tragic drama that turns questions of translation, inheritance, and responsibility into a meditation on intergenerational violence. It begins, memorably, with a dream: Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) recounts a vision of her husband’s father, who delivers an injunction—“kill the light.” The scene is staged in a fixed, carefully balanced frame that later tightens through a slow zoom, as if the image itself were closing in on the unspeakable. The film’s circular architecture returns to this oneiric command at the end, when Ali (Ekin Koç), isolated in dim light and framed in close-up, dreams of his father repeating the same words. The motif works less as a puzzle to be solved than as a formal principle: illumination and its suppression become figures for memory, guilt, and the desire to control what can be seen.
Ali is introduced as a temporary (replacement) professor of translation. In an early classroom exchange, a student presses an unsettling analogy—translation as a kind of “killing.” Ali initially resists the claim, refusing the etymological-poetic shortcut; yet the film gradually complicates that resistance, allowing the association to return as a pressure, a temptation, and finally a coping mechanism. Translation becomes a model for what the characters repeatedly attempt: to convert the unassimilable into something narratable, to rephrase the past so it can be endured, or—more dangerously—to rewrite it so culpability can be displaced.
Formally, Khatami’s most striking strategy is the film’s persistent investment in tableaux. The film repeatedly offers images as composed blocks—internally organized fields that “hold” bodies, gestures, sounds, and duration—rather than merely serving as transparent vehicles for plot. This is especially evident in the majestic snowy mountain landscapes of Turkey, where the grandeur of the frame produces not comfort but estrangement: space appears marvellous yet foreign, and the characters’ inner dislocation is externalized as a geography that does not yield intimacy. In French philosopher Gilles Deleuze terms, these tableaux oscillate between a movement-image logic—compositions oriented toward legible action and consequence—and a time-image logic—optical and affective situations that suspend straightforward sensory-motor resolution. The “whole” is presented as a totality whose elements circulate internally, spiralling and folding back upon themselves.
This tension between public structure and private fracture is also political. The film registers the presence of a “father of the nation”—a leader’s image that saturates Turkish urban space—while remaining notably absent from the countryside. That asymmetry matters: authority is everywhere as iconography and discourse, yet uneven as lived reality, which deepens the film’s sense that familial power and state power rhyme without fully coinciding. The domestic drama—its accusations, silences, and inherited injuries—therefore sits inside a broader apparatus of patriarchy and legitimacy, never reducible to a purely “personal” matter.
One of the film’s most delicate scenes is also its most formally revealing: Ali speaks privately about why he left to study literature in the United States—a decision his superior could not comprehend, given Turkey’s own literary traditions. The scene is staged with an unusual out-of-focus register at the moment of confession, as though the softening of the image were a protective veil. Khatami treats this contingency—an unexpected technical limitation during filming—in a way that recalls Primo Levi’s insistence on writing “without emotion”: the film suggests that certain memories can be approached only through formal displacement—by defocusing the image, cooling affect, and refusing the spectacle of disclosure.
The film’s central rupture is familial and devastating without being sensationalized: Ali’s mother—already ill—dies after a fall, and Ali holds his father responsible. From that point, the narrative becomes a study of how grief can harden into accusation, and how accusation can become a vehicle for older violences to reassert themselves. One of the film’s most audacious gestures—“double-hanger”—occurs midstream, when Ali effectively becomes Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), creating a charged doubling that even folds back onto the director’s own name (“Alireza”). Khatami’s reported closeness to these figures frames the film as an inquiry into selfhood under inheritance: the ways identities can be exchanged, repeated, or even overwritten when trauma is transmitted rather than worked through.
The Things You Kill is acutely attentive to questions of position and belonging. Although the film is realized through the Turkish language, Turkish performers, and landscapes, the screenplay was not originally conceived with Turkey as its primary narrative anchor. Alireza Khatami, an Iranian filmmaker, roots the story chiefly in personal experience and family history in Iran; yet the work does not present itself as “purely” Iranian.
Khatami’s self-description as an orphan or nomadic filmmaker, together with the film’s Canada–France–Poland co-production context, positions cinema as a space of relative freedom—one where the work need not “answer” in advance to national expectation or identity branding. This stance also underwrites the film’s refusal to be reduced to an “ethnic” label as well as a genre film: even as it incorporates Turkish cultural textures with remarkable density, it aims at something more structurally legible—a study of how violence becomes tradition, how familial memory hardens into an inheritance, and how form itself (tableaux and close-ups; shifts from brightness to darkness; the strategic withholding of a guiding musical score) can render that inheritance visible without presuming to resolve it as a linear storyline.
Rating: 4/5