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An Absorbing Sundance Thriller With a Dark Heart
Alireza Khatami’s Sundance thriller is absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving.
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. 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. 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.
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