The Things You Kill Is a Case Study for How to Make an Effective Psychological Thriller

Photo: Bartosz Świniarski

Iranian-American director Alireza Khatami’s brooding thriller The Things You Kill, playing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, takes place in and around an unnamed city in Turkey, so the temptation might be great to view the film in a sociocultural context — especially as it tackles issues of patriarchy, tradition, repression. That wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. But with its overtones of Kafka, Dostoevsky, Lynch, and Hitchcock, the film could take place anywhere; it has cultural specificity and narrative universality. The director has said that he originally wrote the script in Farsi, and that Iranian censorship demands prompted him to move it to another country. The language professor at the story’s center, Ali Özdilek (Ekin Koç), lectures his class at one point about the origins of the word “translation.” He explains that the ancient words contained within it denote the idea of carrying something from one place to another. One student points out that embedded within the idea is also an Arabic word denoting “destruction.” That conversation will clearly inform the story, but it’s also a self-aware nod to the movie’s very existence as a thriller about transformation that takes place in an in-between world.

Ali, we’re told, recently came back from the U.S., and he hasn’t been privy to some disturbing domestic drama that occurred between his elderly parents while he was gone. His concern for his ill, homebound mother isn’t matched by his stern, uncaring father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), who spends all day elsewhere, perhaps with another woman. When his mother winds up dead, Ali begins to have his suspicions. His father’s dusty machismo stands in sharp contrast to Ali’s submerged nature. Our protagonist’s masculinity is even called into question (at least by himself) when he discovers that his sperm has low motility. He and his veterinarian wife, Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) have been trying to have a baby, and their attempts never seem to work. She’s convinced the problem lies with her, and Ali, worried about what it says about him, doesn’t reveal to her what his test results say.

He too begins to spend his days away from home, either teaching a humanities class at Ankara’s Gazi University that is forever on the verge of cancellation, or tending to the family’s decrepit garden in the desolate outskirts of town. One day, a drifter named Rıza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) arrives at the property, with no past and no home, and negotiates a job tending to the land. Rıza is bold and outspoken, and he immediately concocts a plan to thwart (and bribe) local bureaucracy to deepen Ali’s well. He even manages to quickly tame the rather surly guard dog that watches the garden.

Ali and Rıza are not doubles, but there is a sense that this strange drifter fills a lack that the anxious academic feels. (That each man has one-half of the director’s name is not, one suspects, a coincidence.) That could lead to a schematic narrative, but Khatami — unlike a lot of other directors working in these hybrid genres — understands how to build both tension and character. Each person here has shading and dimension, from Ali’s sisters, still emotionally bound to their parents and feeling abandoned by their brother, to the supposed “other woman” in his father’s life, who gets one of the film’s most striking scenes. There are hints of traumatic backstory that are drizzled in without ever purporting to explain or justify anything; instead, they deepen these people and their lives.

The biggest danger with symbolic, psychological thrillers like this is making characters feel too much like pieces on a chessboard, their moves predetermined. All too often, the filmmakers who make such movies rely on cleverness, surprise, sensation — because those elements get momentary rises out of audiences — but they forget to bring their people to life. It’s clear, however, that the dark heart of The Things You Kill comes from a genuine place. It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.