Comparisons to Abbas Kiarostami and David Lynch set a high bar for filmmaker Alireza Khatami, an Iranian who now lives in Canada, and his masterful “The Things You Kill” at Sundance. This unsettling thriller about impotent (emotionally, literally) university professor Ali (Turkish star Ekin Koç), on the path to vengeance after the suspicious death of his mother, scored strong reviews (including my own) and the World Cinema Directing Award out of the Utah festival.
It now represents Canada in the 2026 Best International Feature race and is undoubtedly one of the most formally bold works in foreign Oscar contention. What appears on its head as a social-realist drama in the vein of, say, Asghar Farhadi, takes a sharp hairpin turn in the second half, upending its own premise when the professor confronts an enigmatic gardener who may be an extension of himself, and his own worst impulses. Meanwhile, a key cast member is swapped to a destabilizing effect as Ali’s world comes crashing down.
Khatami, with his second solo directing effort after collaborating with director Ali Asgari on “Terrestrial Verses” and this year’s “Divine Comedy,” has made a film so personal that he’s been reluctant to show it to his own family. That the professor is named Ali, and the gardener Reza, tells you right away what you need to know about a movie directed by a man named Alireza in terms of personal intentions.
“One of my sisters went to a festival, without telling me, to watch it, and that was emotional,” Khatami told IndieWire over Zoom. “I begged her not to tell anybody else. If my family sees it, they will recognize everything. Even the names [of Ali’s sisters] Nesrin and Meriam … [are the names] of two of my siblings. Anybody who sees this movie who knows me on an intimate level. The core of this movie is 100 percent based on truth.”
In “The Things You Kill,” Ali is constantly being challenged not only by his geriatric wreck of a mother, but also his wife, and his two sisters, crushing further on him the burden of masculinity and father-son expectations inherent to Muslim tradition. But did his father kill Ali’s mother?
“There is this dialogue in the film where the wife asks Ali, ‘Did your mom tell you bedside stories?’ And he says, ‘She didn’t like bedside stories. She liked puzzles.’ To me, this movie is about a man’s narrative being challenged by several female narratives. His narrative has to adjust, has to break down and be rebuilt, and get some element of the feminine narrative in the process,” Khatami said.
That Ali might be in pursuit of killing his father Hamit (Ercan Kesal), who has a history of domestic violence, scared off the Iranian censorship board. But not Khatami from making the film, hence the shift to production in Turkey.
“The government was like, ‘This cannot be made.’ Everywhere in the world, old men are in power, so you don’t want to symbolically kill them in the movie, so they didn’t want the father figure to die in the movie. They were telling me, ‘Send him traveling. He goes on a trip and comes back at the end.’ Which I didn’t want to do. Also, I didn’t want to make a movie that is ‘shot illegally.’ I’ve done that before. I don’t want to do it. This is a movie that I wanted to really care about every detail. I didn’t want to shoot it under the ground with non-actors. I wanted professional actors, I wanted to have a movie that lasts, not a movie that makes noise. That’s why I took it to Turkey,” Khatami said.
His last film, “Terrestrial Verses,” a nine-vignette mosaic about the petty bureaucracies of working-class life in Iran, was shot in secret. “I’m familiar with that kind of filmmaking, but it doesn’t excite me. The movie, of course, people go, ‘Oh my god, the movie’s shot illegally.’ There is no value to that for me,” Khatami said. “Yes, some festivals will love you for doing that, but the movie needs to last. For me, politics is capital P. … Of course, Islamophobia sells very well. If you are subtly Islamophobic, you will be well-received in the Cannes competition.”
Khatami believes that Telefilm Canada finally supporting his film as the International Feature Oscar selection is a “huge step forward” for BIPOC filmmakers living in Canada.
“I lived as a refugee in many places before. This is the first time that I have a country that can select a movie of mine. I appreciate Telefilm finally agreeing to let us compete in that selection process,” he said. “There was a little bit of hesitation at the beginning. We went back and forth a lot about the rules and regulations of the Academy, how we are eligible, and finally, Telefilm agreed, and I got a lot of very emotional calls from non-white filmmakers. Some were in tears, who thought they would never select a movie like this. In a way, we broke a barrier for BIPOC filmmakers [in Canada]. Canada is not only interested in the labor of the immigration community; now it finally has embraced their stories as well.”
Part thriller, part moral parable, and part surreal exercise, that “The Things You Kill” is so consistently unpredictable and surprising in its structure, casting, and themes was by design, a way for Khatami to shake up the sleepiness of a lot of modern cinema.
“A few people were surprised by the formal choices we made,” he said of the film’s Sundance premiere. “They didn’t expect that. I knew there were certain expectations from an ‘Iranian filmmaker’ when you make a film in Turkey, so I started the film as a Trojan horse of an Asghar Farhadi movie. People coming to the film think they know the film. When I pull the rug from beneath them, a lot of people who are truly cinephiles are excited to see a bold formal choice, but some people get pissed. ‘Who the hell is he to do that? These kinds of things are supposed to be Gaspar Noé or David Lynch.’ But I’m grateful. A lot of people were quite open to the film, and the more time passed, the better reaction we got.”
Khatami modeled “The Things You Kill” after the kinds of movies that excite him, the boundary-pushing of say the aforementioned Lynch and Kiarostami, which are not de rigeuer for many of his fellow Iranian filmmakers. (Jafar Panahi’s made-in-secret Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident,” for example, was shot in secret but is also one of the dissident Iranian director’s most straightforward narratives.)
“That excites me, a movie that doesn’t die. A movie that, OK, it’s not easily digestible, he said. “I’m a cinephile at heart. I want to push this to some territory that we haven’t discovered yet. What’s the point of me having a couple of flashbacks and say, this guy exists or doesn’t exist? That’s been done many times, so can we push it? A lot of people make films like the cinema is dead, like there is nothing else between my medium shot, your medium shot. Can we do something that is more exhilarating? Of course, there is risk. But that’s what keeps me alive. This movie took eight years for me to make. I don’t want to make medium shot to medium shot. I want to make a movie that, 20 years later, I watch it and say, ‘That’s still watchable.’”
He said that the concept of the film “started as friendship between these two guys [Ali and Reza] and slowly discovering that he’s in negotiation with himself. I started experimenting with my own narrative. I started bringing my sisters into it, my mom into it, my dad into it, building the world around it. But every step of the way, I’m always like a child. I’m like, ‘OK, this is the paved path. But what if I step here? What if I try to go and get lost in this area?’ And that’s always, both as a writer and as a director, exhilarating, right? A lot of people were saying, ‘This will not work.’ People get quite confused. But that was exciting for me. I like dwelling in the confused space.”
That said, “I wouldn’t call it a confusion, but there is a mystery that life is. The capacity to hold the mystery in your hand and say, ‘OK, I’m going to live with this.’ As a filmmaker, I’m not afraid of pushing the audience to almost leave, but I don’t want them to leave, so I tone back. I don’t make experimental films, but I push them to the edge. Still want to leave? I give them something to sit back [for].”
“The Things You Kill” is now in select theaters from Cineverse.