Cerebral The Things You Kill Is Sundance’s Finest Thriller

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A dark, percolating family drama that eventually takes a stunning turn into the savagely metaphorical, writer-director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill proved to be one of the most impressive overall features at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Its trick is in its unexpected genre evolution throughout, opening in fairly grounded territory before ultimately spiraling out into a compellingly imagined psychological thriller, anchored by some dynamic performances from Turkish actors Ekin Koç and Erkan Kolçak Köstendil. Khatami’s third feature after 2023’s Terrestrial Verses is a doom-laden exploration of identity and masculine fragility, one that displays quite a bit of trust in its audience to piece together its wilder swings without any need for coddling or hand-holding.

Koç, an actor and musician, is playing Ali, a university professor teaching language and translation to students in Turkey after studying abroad in the U.S. Whenever he’s able to summon the conviction, he visits his sickly, impoverished mother, stopping by to clean and attempt to make the home she shares with her husband–Ali’s distant, angry and terse father–slightly more livable. His father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), however, resents even these small attempts on Ali’s part to meddle in his affairs, seemingly threatened by his son’s desire to assist as an indictment of his manhood. Ali, meanwhile, is having patriarchal problems of his own, having recently been informed by doctors that his low sperm count will make it unlikely he can father a child–something he hides from wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü) rather than face his self-imposed inadequacy.

Amid this backdrop, Ali meets Reza (Köstendil), an enigmatic drifter who wanders onto the large rural “garden” property Ali owns in a nearby valley. Taking pity on Reza after he asks for a job, Ali hires the man to tend the trees and shrubs of the arid garden, and the two begin a wary feeling out process as they circle each other and volunteer details about their lives. These sequences in the garden–given lushness through some spectacular shooting of Turkish vistas, calling to mind the similar prominence of the natural world in 2024 horror film The Damned–help give voice to the uncertainty and fear of failure that plagues Ali, as he grapples with multiple thematic interpretations of impotence and faces down the fact that he’s approaching an inflection point in his marriage. It’s the suspicious death of Ali’s mother, however, that will push the two men down a road that will almost certainly end in destruction … for someone.

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That death propels The Things You Kill into more overt, almost neo-noir mystery, as Ali begins to learn more about the things that have been hidden from him–or perhaps that he just didn’t want to see–throughout his adult life. As his put-upon sister puts it, commenting on their mother’s reticence to share her struggles with Ali: “She didn’t want to upset her only son. Agony seems reserved solely for women.”

Ali’s investigative efforts result in a brooding slow burn, one that almost imperceptibly ratchets up the level of tension for the first hour or so, before The Things You Kill deploys its full bag of tricks and makes a startling evolution in terms of both intensity and style. Our protagonist is forced to confront his history of repressed patriarchal resentment as it threatens to erupt into overt violence, caught in a power struggle between his more compassionate and barbaric halves. Lynchian influence prominently raises its head as the film ventures into far more daring ground, but it all works … once the audience is able to piece together what exactly is happening. As previously stated, Khatami displays commendable trust in the viewer, refusing to spell out the exact nature of what we’re seeing on screen, waiting for realization to click into place, and making it more satisfying than it otherwise would have been when it does.

The Things You Kill displays occasional moments of startlingly stylish composition, including a few sequences that play with mirrored surfaces to disorienting effect, but more than anything it’s a rock-solid psychological thriller and deconstruction of gendered social roles. Ali is filled with rage surrounding his mother’s death, but fails to deduce that his instinct to act on her behalf is itself a kind of privilege–as a man, he has the prerogative to be angry, to investigate, to lash out. His long-suffering sisters, on the other hand, are afforded no such opportunity–while arguing about their father, his elder sibling tells him that “Getting angry and pretending to care is easy. The real challenge is living with them.” The women of The Things You Kill have surely experienced the same anger and the same bitterness, but they can’t allow it to overwhelm them in cathartic vengeance-seeking. They simply have to endure, and make life as smooth as they can. It’s up to Ali if he can bring his fractured psyche together in enough of a united front to be able to appreciate the position of the women in his life; his wife, his sisters, even his students.

The Things You Kill is best experienced without much information or context, allowing the viewer to steep in its subtle performances and engaging dialog until the arrival of more surprising narrative and stylistic evolution. Alireza Khatami’s smart script and mastery of the psychological thriller speaks across the gulf of language barriers, which will hopefully give the film more exposure in the English speaking world with a future wide release.

Director: Alireza Khatami
Writer: Alireza Khatami
Stars: Ekin Koç, Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, Hazar Ergüçlü, Ercan Kesal
Release date: Jan. 24, 2025 (Sundance Film Festival)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.