At the start of the slow-burning feature “The Things You Kill,” Ali (Ekin Koc), an academic in the English department of a Turkish university, is stewing over several matters: the impending elimination of the course he teaches; a marriage strained by an inability to conceive, a difficulty that he secretly knows is caused by his low sperm count; and, mostly, a concern for his aging mother (Guliz Sirinyan), who is barely mobile and whose husband (Ercan Kesal) regards her — in Ali’s words — as more of a servant than a wife.
Then the mother dies of a head injury, and Ali, more or less alone in his suspicions, begins to question the circumstances of her death. Had his father left her alone for too long? Could her body have landed the way it did from a purely accidental fall? Ali plays detective with her walker, trying to reconstruct what happened.
The plot alone could serve as the basis for an enticing thriller, but “The Things You Kill,” directed by the Iran-born, Canada-based filmmaker Alireza Khatami, is slipperier than that. A clue that something is up comes when Ali muses on the linguistic relationship between the word “translation” and a root that means “to kill.” And Khatami’s visual strategies — he uses relatively few close-ups, plays tricks with focus and includes an elaborate mirror shot that confounds the viewer’s sense of orientation — help tip the movie toward the surreal.
Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but “The Things You Kill” has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.
The Things You Kill
Not rated. In Turkish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
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