In The Things You Kill, the new film from Toronto-based Iranian director Alireza Khatami, a harrowing instance of femicide serves as a mirror to a society buckling under the weight of patriarchy. The unnerving psychological thriller—Canada’s submission for best international feature film at next year’s Academy Awards—follows Ali, a literature professor reeling from his mother’s suspicious death, who, in the process of confronting the toxic masculinity around him, instead becomes ensnared in it.
Khatami’s meditation on gender, family, and power was originally set in contemporary Iran but moved to Turkey when Khatami faced issues with Iran’s censorship office. Sadly, much of it translates all too well, arriving as Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reasserting traditional gender norms under the banner of so-called family values.
Looming over Erdogan’s “year of the family” is a sustained assault on feminists in Turkey. Since being elected president in 2014, Erdogan has said women cannot be treated as equal to men, accused feminists of rejecting Islam’s special role for mothers, and branded women who forgo motherhood as “deficient” and “half persons.” In 2021, he withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, the world’s first binding treaty to prevent violence against women.
The unsurprising result of this politics of resentment has been an uptick in homicides against women. We Will Stop Femicides Platform, a female-led NGO that documents femicides in Turkey, reported that men murdered 394 women in Turkey in 2024, while 259 women died under suspicious circumstances. It was the highest number of femicides since the organization started keeping the data in 2010.
Against this backdrop—or even against that of Khatami’s home country of Iran, where women’s rights are severely restricted, there are no laws preventing domestic abuse, and femicides also appear to be on the rise—the portrait of one man’s unraveling becomes a parable for a broader crisis. The Things You Kill examines the poisoned masculinity that sons inherit from their fathers and the false salvation promised by the ideology of the manosphere. This condition fractures the self, making men aware enough to recognize this cycle, yet powerless to stop themselves from repeating it.
In Turkey, my homeland, this is an ongoing struggle. From birth, young men are assigned roles defined by patriarchy. They are expected to be authoritative, suppress their emotions, and avoid vulnerability, lest they be dismissed as weak or soft. The film asks, then, what it would take to break this pattern—for men to step out of their fathers’ shadows and redefine manhood as something less violent and more humane.
Water spills out of a silver car, which hangs upside down from a rope pulling it out of a lake. Three men stand on the shore and watch.
Film still from The Things You Kill. Cineverse
Ali seems like the kind of man who would chafe against the straitjacket of Turkish family values. Soft-spoken, thoughtful, and articulate, he doesn’t talk or walk like a macho Turk. After having spent 14 years studying in the United States, he now lectures on literary translation at Ankara’s Gazi University. But all that time and distance weren’t enough to shield Ali from his father’s toxic shadow.
We watch Ali care for his ailing mother, Melahat, whose house has fallen into disarray. Melahat notes how he’s “just like” his father as he points to things that need changing. When his father, Hamit, arrives, tensions flare—“This is my house!” Hamit shouts. Ali, portrayed in a virtuoso performance by Ekin Koc, fears he is destined to inherit his father’s cruelty, despite his efforts in exile to become a different type of man.
Whatever stability Ali possessed collapses one day when Hamit calls to say Melahat is dead—found face-down and unresponsive in their home. Ali has a disturbing thought: Might his father have killed his mother? “She was more slave than your wife!” Ali shouts at his father in fury.
Ali’s twin failures—to protect his mother and to conceive a child with his wife, Hazar—converge into a singular self-loathing. He begins sleeping on the couch, crying through the night. Though trained in literature, Ali refuses to articulate his resentment and sadness over what he sees as his increasing resemblance to his father. Like most men, he needs therapy. Like most men, he wells up his feelings instead.
Ali seeks solace in his garden, which is located far from his and Hazar’s apartment. There he meets Reza, a parched traveler who asks for water. When Ali asks where he’s from, Reza answers cryptically, “The north.” At first, Reza is just another reminder of Ali’s incompetence, scolding Ali for how poorly he has tended his garden. But Reza’s presence is alluring to Ali. He is single, childless, claims to be a Harvard graduate, and offers wise-sounding advice: “No one in life is resentful from birth,” and, “Laws are for the poor.” Seemingly unaffected by expectations of wokeness, he’s the kind of guy who would seem at home in the manosphere today.
Ali hires Reza to tend the garden and hands over the keys to his shed. As his lodger, Reza even wears Ali’s old clothes. Strangely, no one else seems aware of his existence. As Reza’s presence in Ali’s life grows, the literature professor becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth about his mother’s death, piecing together evidence of abuse that occurred while he was abroad.
Midway through, the film takes a Lynchian turn, and reality starts to unravel. Reza overtakes Ali—literally—chaining him to a doghouse and feeding him water from a bowl. The world doesn’t seem to notice the switch, and people treat Reza as Ali. And unlike Ali, whose tragic flaw is his inability to take decisive action, Reza acts: bribing officials for permission to drill a well, revealing Ali’s infertility to Hazar, and redirecting his inheritance for fertility treatment overseas.
Years ago, I translated The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a Turkish publisher. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella follows a respectable man who leads a double life by scientifically separating the good and evil sides of himself. As a Victorian gentleman, Jekyll yearns for freedom from societal restraint, and his alter ego indulges in promiscuity, excessive drinking, and other vices that would otherwise ruin his reputation.
Khatami’s film hums with similar tension. Yet he identifies the source not as repressed urges but as something inherited, a cycle that has yet to be broken. Before Ali can reclaim his life from Reza, he learns that his father had been a gentle boy who was mentally and physically scarred by his own violent father. That wound, passed down through generations, becomes the film’s haunting refrain: the sins of the father repeating, each act of violence begetting another, in an endless loop.
A man walks ahead of a woman and a young child carrying umbrellas, reaching his hand back toward them.
A father reaches out a hand to his son as they walk in Ankara, Turkey, on Sept. 26, 2017.Altan Gocher/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Khatami’s cinema has always been haunted by the struggles—and silencing—of women. His debut feature, Oblivion Verses (2017), follows a Chilean morgue caretaker who discovers the body of a young woman killed by authorities and tries to give her a proper burial.
The Things You Kill builds on that preoccupation, and it is difficult to comprehend it fully without the context of Terrestrial Verses (2023), Khatami’s film—co-directed with Ali Asgari—that captured the mood of Tehran in the wake of the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and unsettled me more than any other film I have seen this decade. Across a series of vignettes, Terrestrial Verses shows Iranians being obstructed by their government, revealing in fine detail how authoritarianism seeps into the mundane: A man must strip and reveal his tattoos to receive a driver’s license; a woman endures the humiliation of her boss’s advances during a job interview; a father is barred from naming his newborn David because doing so would “propagate foreign culture”; a young woman is punished for driving without a headscarf, even though her brother was behind the wheel.
In its penultimate vignette, a government official scolds a filmmaker named Ali for writing a script titled The Things You Kill. The official claims Ali has insulted a father character by portraying him as violent. “You can’t allow a father to be killed in your script,” he warns, reflecting the regime’s greatest fear—the youth rising up against their patriarchs. When Ali defends the tradition of patricide in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, the officer scolds Ali for making Western references at a time when “we’re trying to stop the cultural hegemony of the West.” (Ali’s answer, “You’re just stopping my film, not the West,” is a cracker.)
Ali eventually agrees to cut the references to domestic violence and patricide, leaving him with half of his original script. Perhaps, the officer suggests, he should tell a story from the Qur’an instead. Ali refuses the officer’s propositions. “I’m writing my life story here,” he says.
Indeed, the film of the same name that Khatami went on to make was originally written to take place and be filmed in Tehran, but Khatami had to change plans. After the success of Terrestrial Verses at Cannes, Asgari was temporarily banned by the Iranian authorities from leaving the country and directing films. Khatami, meanwhile, couldn’t accept removing the parts of the script that dealt with patricide as the censors demanded. Instead of editing his script, he had the original translated from Farsi into Turkish and rewrote the story for a Turkish setting.
It occurs to me that cultural translation—across languages, identities, and selves—is key to understanding The Things You Kill, a film that rewards multiple viewings with its multi-layered script. In an early scene, Ali lectures on various etymologies of the word “translation.” In English, he explains, the word comes from the Latin translatio, with trans meaning “across” while latio derives from latus, the past participle of ferre, which means “to carry.” But in Turkish, the word for translation, tercume, is rooted in mutercim, to interpret. A student, however, tells Ali to think of another Persian root. Recm means “to stone, to curse, to kill” in Farsi. In this interpretation, for a new term to exist, a previous version has to be murdered.
Khatami deftly explores the dilemma of masculinity at play across societies, recognizing that it is not simply a choice between toxicity and virtue. Ali is torn between his soft-spoken yet ineffectual self and Reza, his aggressive yet capable double. Together, their names form Alireza, the first name of Khatami himself. Ali’s struggle suggests that true growth may lie not in killing certain parts of ourselves but in merging these selves together. Only by reconciling these opposing forces can he achieve self-confidence rooted in empathy, self-knowledge, and altruism, instead of insecurity, repression, and aggression.
It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it is a call for revolution in how men in patriarchal societies—whether in Iran, Turkey, or the West—conceive of their personal and political futures. It’s a plea to break the cycle of misogyny, homophobia, and violent domination that has defined contemporary manhood, not just in relationships but in societies writ large. Otherwise, masculinity will become a nightmare from which no man can wake.
