The Things You Kill

Nominated for 3 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Picture and Best Direction! (Alireza Khatami)

Canada’s selection for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards!

Part of TIFF’s Canada Top Ten for 2025!

Though The Things You Kill is bold in so many regards, the most startling quality of Alireza Khatami’s third feature may be its ability to subvert all of cinema’s usual rules of engagement as it subtly slips between styles, modes, and genres. With his enigmatic merging of fraught family drama, dread-filled mystery, and piercing study of imperiled masculinity, Khatami exerts a powerful hold on his viewers, leading them somewhere they could never expect.

The man at the centre of this turbulence, Ali (Ekin Koç), is equally unsuspecting of what lies ahead. A literature professor who’s returned home to Turkey with his veterinarian wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü), Ali is already wracked with uncertainties when he is rocked by a family crisis and a further revelation about his domineering father Hamit (Ercan Kesal). He forges a fateful connection when he meets Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), an itinerant man hired to help out at his property in the countryside. The two men’s intensifying bond will have profound ramifications for Ali, whose formidable array of external and internal pressures soon causes fissures and fractures not only within himself but throughout the increasingly unpredictable reality that surrounds him.

Presented in Turkish with English subtitles.