“A triumph of screenwriting that requires full focus and ample time to let it all sink in, but becomes more rewarding the longer you sit with it.”

Problems are piling up for Ali (Ekin Koç). His tenure as a professor is coming to an end, his low sperm count won’t allow him and his wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) to conceive and fulfill their long-cherished child wish, the soil in his remote garden is dry as parchment, and to make things even worse his ailing mother dies. Ali’s feelings of guilt over this are strong, since he left her alone with his domineering father (Ercan Kesal) for 18 years to go study and work abroad. The garden problem looks to resolve itself when Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) walks in, offering to take care of it for Ali, for a small price of course. He also explains to his new patron how to grease the wheels of bureaucracy so that the well on his property can be deepened, unearthing a much-needed water supply. With his marriage on a rocky road because masculine pride prevents him from telling Hazar that his little swimmers are the problem, Ali increasingly starts to suspect his father of killing his mother, especially when he finds out dad has a woman on the side. When, with the help of Reza, he takes matters into his own hands, everything starts to unravel.

The central relationship in Iranian-born director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill is that between Ali and Reza, the stranger who saunters into his dried-up garden. These men are like two sides of a coin, and probably not coincidentally the two halves of the director’s name: Reza is everything Ali is not, a man with confidence and not a care in the world, and someone willing to bowl over others to get what he wants. In this he is the mirror image of Ali, who holds secrets and hides his resentment, only letting it out when bickering with his estranged father. At a key moment in the film, as Ali is convinced of the murder of his mother at the hands of his father, Reza flips the relationship when the two men exact revenge on the patriarch. The rest of the film, and even that which came before, falls into focus (also literally) in a scene late in the film, as Ali explains to the dean of his college why he chose comparative literature as his subject to study in the United States. Khatami shoots Ali out of focus as he relates a traumatic story from his past, slowly bringing him back into the world and in focus as he nears the end of it. A sly mirror shot already gave us a good hint on how to interpret Ali and Reza as characters.

One of the central themes is the inherited violence that goes from generation to generation, a result of hiding our full selves from those who come after us. As if Halina Reijn’s Babygirl didn’t already teach us that not being your full self, dark warts and all, is a dangerous proposition. Ali has a positive image of his grandfather, but this is shattered when he comes to learn the cruelties this man inflicted upon his dad, cruelties that his dad had always hidden from him. The mistress knows Ali’s father as a kind and loving man, an image formed without knowing the beatings her lover gave his wife. Ali’s true, full self is realized in his relationship with Reza, who looks remarkably like him.

While at first glance a straightforward revenge tale, the slow-burn The Things You Kill gradually reveals itself to be using this premise as a vessel for the examination of something far deeper and more existentialist. An intricate web of narrative sleight-of-hand and visual cues, Khatami’s latest forces the viewer to pay close attention, lest they be lost in confusion. Added to the film’s intricate writing is a roster of strong performances, with an at once intense and soft turn by Koç as Ali, the smoldering heart of the film that is set aflame by a moment of violence, and in whom all of the threads of Khatami’s web come together. Exquisitely lensed by Polish DP Bartosz Swiniarski, whose simmering renderings of the Anatolian outback evoke some of the works of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (most notably his Once Upon a Time… of course), The Things You Kill will slowly get under your skin, revealing itself as you peel away layer after layer until the darkest parts of the protagonist are laid bare. The film is a triumph of screenwriting that requires full focus and ample time to let it all sink in, but becomes more rewarding the longer you sit with it.