The Things You Kill (2025) by Alireza Khatami
TR / FR / PL / CA | 2025 | 114 min | Psychological Revenge Drama
When the Search for Justice Creates Another Form of Violence
Ali is a university professor whose apparently controlled life begins to unravel after the suspicious death of his ailing mother. Convinced that something darker lies behind what happened, he turns to Reza, the enigmatic gardener working on his barren property, and draws him into an act of revenge.
What initially resembles a recognizable story about grief and retaliation gradually becomes something stranger. Ali believes violence can be delegated while he remains morally separate from it, but Alireza Khatami progressively destabilizes that distinction. Revenge changes from something Ali wants done into something that forces him to confront his own relationship with violence, masculinity, family and identity.
➡️ Movie Insight: The Things You Kill begins with a man wanting accountability and gradually asks what happens when accountability becomes indistinguishable from retaliation. Ali believes revenge can restore a moral balance destroyed by his mother's death, but every step toward punishment pulls him deeper into the violence he condemns. The film turns getting even into a confrontation with what revenge does to the person pursuing it.
Why This Movie Matters Right Now: Accountability and Retaliation Are Becoming Harder to Separate
Contemporary culture places increasing emphasis on accountability. People expect wrongdoing to be exposed, consequences to follow and those responsible for harm to answer for their actions.
But accountability contains an important tension.
At what point does the desire to correct harm become the desire to make another person suffer?
That distinction matters far beyond criminal justice. It appears in relationships, workplaces, communities, institutions and online behavior whenever demands for consequences become intertwined with anger, humiliation or retaliation.
The Things You Kill makes that tension personal. Ali's initial desire appears understandable: he believes his mother has been wronged and wants someone held responsible. But the further he moves from discovering the truth toward punishing the person he considers responsible, the more difficult it becomes to separate justice from revenge.
Khatami has described the film as part of a larger examination of recurring violence, asking what fuels the impulse toward violence and who can break free from the cycle.
➡️ Why It Matters: Accountability seeks consequences for harm, while revenge seeks emotional repayment through another person's suffering. In moments of anger, those motivations can become difficult to distinguish because punishment can feel like justice to the person who has been hurt. The Things You Kill asks what happens when correcting one wrong becomes the justification for creating another.
Should You Watch It?: A Revenge Thriller That Slowly Turns Against the Person Seeking Revenge
Watch The Things You Kill if you prefer psychological thrillers that destabilize their own premise. The film begins relatively conventionally as a family drama before moving through revenge, mystery and increasingly dreamlike psychological territory.
The transition is deliberate. Ali's emotional state becomes less stable as his relationship with Reza deepens, and the film's visual language follows him away from ordinary realism toward something more ambiguous. The supplied reception repeatedly identifies this second-act transformation as the point where the movie changes dramatically.
Ekin Koç and Erkan Kolçak Köstendil become central to that transformation. Their characters initially appear to occupy different positions—professor and gardener, instigator and executor—but those distinctions become increasingly difficult to maintain as revenge changes Ali's understanding of himself.
➡️ Viewing Recommendation: Watch it for the psychological consequences of revenge rather than the mechanics of retaliation. Khatami is less interested in whether Ali can successfully punish someone than in what pursuing punishment reveals about him. The result is a slow-burn thriller where the most dangerous confrontation gradually moves inside the protagonist.
Why Everyone Is Talking About It: A Sundance Directing Winner That Became an International Festival Breakout
The Things You Kill premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where Alireza Khatami won the Directing Award. Sundance's jury highlighted the film's combination of formal precision, psychological depth and examination of toxic masculinity and darkness beneath everyday behavior.
Its momentum continued internationally. The supplied awards record lists 8 wins and 27 nominations, including screenplay and FIPRESCI recognition, the Summit Award at Vancouver, Best International Feature at RIFFA and the Jury Prize at Reims.
The film subsequently received 2026 Canadian Screen Award nominations for Best Motion Picture, Achievement in Direction and Original Screenplay, while Canada selected it as its submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 98th Academy Awards.
The recognition reflects how Khatami combines an accessible revenge premise with a much stranger psychological structure. Sundance described the film as an examination of generational patriarchy, collectively tolerated behavior and cycles of violence, while Khatami has characterized the project as deeply connected to his own confrontation with family history.
➡️ Viral Potential: The Things You Kill has built momentum because its revenge story becomes increasingly difficult to explain without revealing the psychological transformation that makes it distinctive. Sundance recognition gave the film an international launch, while subsequent festival and awards attention expanded the conversation around Khatami's direction and Ekin Koç's performance. Its strongest word-of-mouth hook is the moment viewers realize they are no longer watching the revenge film they thought they understood.
Why The Things You Kill Stands Out: Revenge Does Not Restore Ali's Identity — It Splits It Apart
Conventional revenge narratives usually establish a relatively clear moral progression. Someone is harmed, the protagonist identifies the person responsible and retaliation becomes the mechanism through which balance might be restored.
Khatami disrupts that structure.
Ali wants someone else to perform the violence for him. This initially allows him to imagine a moral distance between wanting revenge and physically committing it.
Reza destroys that distance.
As their relationship becomes increasingly strange, the boundary between the man who desires violence and the man who performs it begins to collapse. Revenge therefore stops being something Ali can outsource because its psychological consequences remain his.
The question changes from:
Will Ali get revenge?
to:
What has wanting revenge revealed about Ali?
➡️ Cinema Insight: The Things You Kill makes revenge psychologically destabilizing rather than emotionally cleansing. Ali attempts to punish violence while remaining separate from it, but retaliation progressively erases that moral distance. Khatami turns the revenge thriller inward until the person seeking justice becomes the film's most important mystery.
Movie Trend: Psychological Revenge Drama — When Taking Revenge Means Becoming the Person You Thought You Had Escaped
Ali's desire for revenge emerges from grief, suspicion and anger. Yet his response also reconnects him with patterns of violence embedded within the family environment from which he believed he had created distance.
That contradiction transforms revenge into identity crisis.
Movie Trend Formula:LOSS → SUSPICION → ANGER → DESIRE FOR JUSTICE → REVENGE → DELEGATED VIOLENCE → ESCALATION → MORAL BOUNDARIES COLLAPSE → IDENTITY FRACTURES → INHERITED BEHAVIOR RETURNS → SELF-CONFRONTATION
Khatami has described the film as an attempt to reconcile with his own history and the legacy of violence within his family. He also frames the movie through a dual psychological and political perspective, connecting individual behavior with the patriarchal structures surrounding it.
That makes Ali's transformation more than an individual descent. He wants to respond to an injustice without becoming part of the violent system that produced it, yet the methods he chooses progressively reproduce that system.
➡️ Movie Trend: Psychological revenge dramas increasingly question the fantasy that retaliation provides emotional closure. Revenge can promise restored control while simultaneously pulling the person seeking it deeper into the behavior they condemn. The Things You Kill makes that contradiction literal by transforming Ali's search for justice into a confrontation with his own capacity for violence.
Broad Trend: Justice vs Revenge — When Accountability Becomes Difficult to Separate From Retaliation
The distinction between justice and revenge appears simple until people experience harm personally.
Justice asks:
What consequence is appropriate for what happened?
Revenge asks:
How can the person responsible experience some of the pain they caused?
Emotionally, those motivations can overlap.
This tension increasingly appears wherever accountability is negotiated socially. In relationships, someone who has been betrayed may want acknowledgment but also want the other person to hurt. In workplaces, legitimate demands for consequences can become entangled with humiliation. In online communities, exposing wrongdoing can shift into collective punishment. In institutions, public pressure for accountability can create expectations that visible punishment itself proves justice has occurred.
The underlying progression becomes:
HARM → ANGER → DEMAND FOR ACCOUNTABILITY → DESIRE FOR CONSEQUENCES → EMOTIONAL NEED FOR RETRIBUTION → JUSTICE AND REVENGE BEGIN TO OVERLAP → ESCALATION
The difference lies partly in purpose.
Accountability ideally asks how responsibility can be established, harm addressed and recurrence prevented. Revenge centers more directly on retaliation. Yet anger can make retaliation feel morally justified because causing consequences to the offender appears capable of restoring the balance disrupted by the original harm.
The Things You Kill reflects this broader tension through Ali. His mother's death gives his anger an understandable source, but the film refuses to assume that understandable anger automatically legitimizes whatever follows.
Broad Trend Formula:WRONGDOING → HURT → ANGER → ACCOUNTABILITY → PUNISHMENT → RETALIATION → ESCALATION → NEW HARM → QUESTIONING WHAT JUSTICE WAS SUPPOSED TO ACHIEVE
The wider social challenge is therefore not whether wrongdoing should have consequences. It is determining what those consequences are intended to accomplish.
➡️ Broad Trend: Accountability and revenge can begin from the same experience of being wronged but move toward very different goals. One seeks responsibility for harm; the other can become emotionally invested in returning that harm. Justice vs Revenge captures the growing difficulty of preserving that distinction when anger, public judgment and the desire for consequences operate simultaneously.
Why Psychological Revenge Dramas Are Popular: Audiences Are Questioning Whether Getting Even Actually Resolves Anything
Traditional revenge stories offer a seductive emotional structure: harm creates imbalance, retaliation restores balance and the protagonist regains control.
Contemporary psychological revenge dramas increasingly challenge that promise.
The interesting question becomes not whether revenge succeeds, but what success would actually mean. If the offender suffers, does grief disappear? Does trauma reverse? Does violence become morally different because someone believes it is deserved?
The Things You Kill pushes these questions further by connecting revenge with identity. Ali's attempt to retaliate does not simply affect the target of his anger; it changes his relationship with himself.
That makes the genre particularly relevant to a culture increasingly negotiating accountability publicly. Audiences understand the emotional satisfaction promised by retaliation while also recognizing how easily cycles of punishment can escalate.
➡️ Audience Motivation: Revenge stories allow audiences to experience the fantasy of restoring control after wrongdoing while simultaneously examining its consequences. Psychological revenge dramas complicate that fantasy by asking whether retaliation actually repairs anything. The Things You Kill makes the question especially uncomfortable because Ali's revenge gradually threatens the identity of the person seeking it.
Viewer Profile: Identity Explorers - Viewers Choosing Psychological Dramas About People Discovering Parts of Themselves They Thought They Had Escaped
Identity Explorers are drawn to films where external conflict exposes internal contradictions. They are interested in characters who believe they understand themselves until crisis reveals behaviors, desires or inherited patterns that challenge that identity.
Ali is particularly suited to this viewer because he appears intellectually and professionally removed from the patriarchal violence surrounding his family. His mother's death tests that distance.
Audience Dimension | Profile |
Core Audience | Viewers drawn to psychological thrillers, revenge dramas and international arthouse cinema |
Age Group | Adult viewers interested in morally complex character studies |
Lifestyle | Reflective audiences interested in identity, family systems, power, masculinity and social change |
Cinema Taste | Psychological mystery, slow-burn thrillers, surreal drama and morally ambiguous international cinema |
Streaming Behavior | Festival discoveries, awards-driven viewing, independent releases and filmmaker-led recommendations |
Discovery Mindset | Looks for films that destabilize simple moral categories and reward interpretation after viewing |
➡️ Audience Insight: Identity Explorers are interested in the moment characters discover that their self-image is incomplete. Ali believes he can separate himself from both the violence surrounding his family and the violence he commissions, but revenge gradually makes that distinction impossible to sustain. The film turns retaliation into an unsettling form of self-discovery.
What This Movie Means for the Industry: Revenge Cinema Is Moving From Punishing the Enemy to Questioning the Avenger
The Things You Kill demonstrates how filmmakers can use recognizable genre structures as entry points into more complex social and psychological questions.
The revenge premise is accessible. A parent dies under suspicious circumstances. The child wants accountability. Someone is recruited to retaliate.
But Khatami progressively removes the certainty normally associated with that structure.
The film becomes psychological mystery, identity drama, family reckoning and examination of patriarchal violence without completely abandoning the revenge mechanism that connects those elements.
Its Sundance Directing Award is significant in that context. The festival jury recognized Khatami's ability to retain narrative control while addressing toxic masculinity and darker social structures, and Sundance subsequently positioned the film as an examination of cycles of violence and the cost of escaping inherited systems.
➡️ Industry Insight: Contemporary genre cinema can use familiar revenge narratives without delivering the emotional certainty traditionally associated with them. The conflict increasingly moves from whether an enemy deserves punishment toward what punishment does to the person demanding it. The Things You Kill shows how genre can remain accessible while opening into much larger questions about accountability, violence and social inheritance.
Creative Analysis: Turning Revenge Into a Confrontation With the Self
Khatami constructs The Things You Kill around a gradual collapse of distance. Ali initially believes he can remain separate from the violence he wants committed, but the narrative, performances and visual language progressively undermine that assumption. The revenge mechanism becomes a way of separating Ali from the identity he believes belongs to him.
Storytelling: Making a Revenge Story Slowly Become an Identity Mystery
The screenplay begins with an understandable emotional progression: Ali's mother dies, he becomes suspicious and his grief turns toward retaliation.
Then Reza enters.
Ali initially appears to solve his moral problem by delegating violence. Someone else can perform the act while he retains distance from it.
But the second half destabilizes that division. The relationship between Ali and Reza becomes increasingly psychologically charged, and the film's central mystery shifts from what happened to Ali's mother toward what is happening inside Ali himself.
Direction: Making Reality Less Stable as Ali Becomes Less Certain of Himself
Khatami begins within recognizable realism before gradually allowing psychological uncertainty to reshape the film.
That progression is essential.
If the film began in complete surrealism, Ali's destabilization would carry less force. Instead, ordinary family relationships, university life and gardening establish a world whose apparent stability can slowly deteriorate.
Khatami has described the challenge as grounding bold psychological and formal choices within believable everyday reality.
The form therefore follows the character: the less certain Ali becomes about himself, the less reliable the boundaries of his world appear.
Performances: Making Ali and Reza Feel Like Opposing Possibilities Within the Same Conflict
Ekin Koç and Erkan Kolçak Köstendil create the psychological center of the film.
Ali appears educated, restrained and capable of intellectual distance. Reza appears closer to physical action and the violence Ali wants performed.
But their relationship gradually complicates those distinctions.
Reza does not merely function as Ali's instrument. His presence forces Ali to confront the uncomfortable relationship between wanting violence and performing violence, making the two characters increasingly important to understanding the film's fractured sense of identity.
Visual Style: Making the Landscape Reflect Internal Decay
Bartosz Świniarski's cinematography turns physical environments into extensions of Ali's psychological condition. The supplied material particularly identifies the nearly barren garden, architectural framing, darkness and shifts in focus as recurring visual mechanisms.
The garden carries particular significance because Ali is also struggling with infertility. Growth becomes difficult both literally and symbolically.
Sundance notes that Khatami deliberately avoids conventional close-ups and music in significant stretches of the film, creating emotional distance and isolation as Ali attempts to control an environment increasingly slipping away from him.
Themes: Justice Becomes Dangerous When Punishment Starts Feeling Like Healing
Ali's original wound cannot actually be reversed.
His mother cannot be restored through revenge.
That creates the fundamental psychological trap. Retaliation promises to change how Ali feels about something that cannot be changed, making another person's suffering appear capable of resolving his own.
But revenge creates action rather than restoration.
The film therefore asks whether punishment can truly provide the emotional repair people expect from it, particularly when grief and anger have become inseparable.
This connects directly to the broader Justice vs Revenge tension: consequences may be necessary, but punishment becomes something different when the suffering of another person becomes the desired emotional outcome.
What Makes It Different: The Person Ali Wants to Punish Is Not the Only Person Revenge Changes
The Things You Kill gradually removes the comfort of imagining revenge as a transaction between victim and offender.
Ali initiates retaliation because he wants another person to experience consequences.
Instead, retaliation transforms Ali.
His relationship with Reza destabilizes his identity, his moral boundaries become less reliable and the violent structures he believed existed outside himself begin appearing within him.
The revenge therefore reaches its most important target unexpectedly.
The person it changes most profoundly is the person seeking it.
➡️ Creative Insight: The Things You Kill transforms revenge from an act of punishment into a mechanism of self-exposure. Ali believes violence can be delegated while its moral consequences remain outside him, but Khatami gradually collapses the boundary between ordering retaliation and becoming shaped by it. The film's psychological mystery ultimately asks whether revenge punishes the enemy without also transforming the avenger.
If You Liked The Things You Kill: When the Search for Justice Turns Into Revenge
Vengeance (2026) by Rodrigo Valdés: When Grief Turns Justice Into a Mission to Make Someone Pay
After his wife is brutally murdered, special-forces veteran Carlos Estrada becomes consumed by the need to punish those responsible. An unexpected fortune gives him the resources to assemble his former soldiers and transform personal grief into an organized campaign of retaliation.
➡️ Why It Connects: Vengeance provides a more direct action-driven counterpart to The Things You Kill, but both begin with the same dangerous emotional progression: loss creates anger, anger demands justice and justice gradually becomes indistinguishable from revenge. Carlos and Ali convince themselves that retaliation can restore something taken from them, even as violence creates consequences of its own. Together, the films expose how easily the language of justice can become permission to make someone else suffer.
It Was Just an Accident (2025) by Jafar Panahi: When the Chance to Punish Your Torturer Makes Revenge Morally Uncertain
Former political prisoner Vahid believes he has unexpectedly encountered the man who tortured him in prison. He kidnaps the suspected perpetrator intending to take revenge, but uncertainty about the man's identity transforms retaliation into a moral dilemma involving memory, trauma, punishment and the possibility that revenge could create another injustice.
➡️ Why It Connects: This is the closest thematic companion to The Things You Kill because both films dismantle the distinction between justice and revenge from inside the person seeking retaliation. Vahid and Ali have understandable reasons for anger, yet neither film allows suffering to become automatic moral permission for violence. Both ultimately ask the same uncomfortable question: if you cannot be completely certain that revenge will repair the original harm, what exactly are you trying to achieve by making someone else suffer?
Monkey Man (2024) by Dev Patel: When Personal Revenge Expands Into Anger Against a Corrupt System
Kid has spent years carrying the trauma of what happened to his family. After infiltrating the world of the powerful people connected to that violence, his personal desire for revenge grows into a wider confrontation with corruption, inequality and institutional power.
➡️ Why It Connects: Monkey Man and The Things You Kill both begin with deeply personal wounds but gradually reveal that revenge cannot be separated from the larger systems surrounding those wounds. Kid channels trauma outward through increasingly violent retaliation, while Ali discovers that pursuing vengeance reconnects him with the very structures of violence he believes he opposes. Both films therefore complicate the fantasy that revenge simply restores justice: retaliation can challenge power while simultaneously reproducing its methods.
➡️ If You Liked Insight: These films turn revenge from emotional satisfaction into a question about what justice is actually supposed to accomplish. Their protagonists have legitimate reasons for anger, yet retaliation progressively makes punishment, accountability and personal vengeance harder to separate. The Things You Kill belongs to this shift because the most important consequence of revenge is not what happens to the person being punished, but what the desire to punish does to the person seeking justice.
Final Verdict: Revenge Cannot Restore the Person You Were Before the Harm
The Things You Kill understands the emotional attraction of revenge before dismantling its promise.
Ali has been hurt. His anger has a recognizable source. His desire for accountability is understandable.
But Khatami refuses to treat understandable anger as automatic moral permission.
Instead, the film follows what happens when the desire for justice becomes inseparable from the desire to retaliate. Every attempt Ali makes to place violence outside himself ultimately brings it closer.
Khatami has described the film as an attempt to confront both personal and societal cycles of violence, asking not only what produces them but who can finally break free.
➡️ Final Verdict: The Things You Kill begins with the emotional logic of revenge and gradually exposes its contradiction. Ali wants violence to restore a moral balance, yet retaliation makes him increasingly resemble the structures he believes he is punishing. The film leaves behind a disturbing question: if revenge changes who you become, what exactly has been restored?
Quick Facts: A Revenge Thriller Where the Avenger Becomes the Mystery
Title | The Things You Kill |
Original Title | Öldürdüğün Şeyler |
Director | Alireza Khatami |
Writer | Alireza Khatami |
Lead Cast | Ekin Koç, Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, Hazar Ergüçlü |
Year | 2025 |
Runtime | 114 min |
Countries | Turkey / France / Poland / Canada |
Languages | Turkish / English |
Festival Launch | Sundance Film Festival 2025 — World Cinema Dramatic Competition |
Major Sundance Recognition | Directing Award — World Cinema Dramatic |
Movie Trend | Psychological Revenge Drama — When Taking Revenge Means Becoming the Person You Thought You Had Escaped |
Broad Trend | Justice vs Revenge — When Accountability Becomes Difficult to Separate From Retaliation |
Viewer Profile | Identity Explorers |
Core Conflict | A grieving professor seeking accountability for his mother's death crosses from justice into retaliation |
Creative Hook | A revenge narrative gradually transforms into a psychological identity mystery |
Core Themes | Revenge, justice, violence, identity, masculinity, family inheritance, guilt and moral responsibility |
Final Insights: When Accountability Turns Into the Desire to Make Someone Pay
Justice vs Revenge reflects a wider social tension around what accountability is supposed to accomplish. People increasingly expect wrongdoing to produce visible consequences, whether in relationships, workplaces, institutions or public life. That expectation can protect victims and challenge impunity, but anger can also shift the objective from addressing harm toward ensuring that the person responsible experiences suffering in return.
The distinction will become increasingly important as accountability becomes more public, immediate and socially amplified. Consequences can establish responsibility and discourage future harm, while retaliation can create new grievances that perpetuate the original conflict. The challenge is not abandoning accountability; it is preventing accountability from becoming another word for revenge.
➡️ Final Insight: Justice and revenge can begin with the same demand that wrongdoing should have consequences, but they diverge in what those consequences are meant to achieve. Justice looks toward responsibility and what happens next, while revenge can remain emotionally tied to returning the pain already experienced. The Things You Kill reflects the danger of crossing that boundary without realizing when accountability has become retaliation.
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