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Sundance 2025 Review: The Things You Kill

The suspicious death of his mother causes a part-time university professor to seek retribution.

A dream being recounted by the wife of an academic setups a foreboding persona for her father-in-law which is subsequently proven by his volatile onscreen introduction when questioned about the living conditions and treatment of his frail wife by their son. Matters are made worse when the academic learns that he has a low sperm count which undermines his spouse’s desire to have a child and that his elective course is going to be discontinued; things go over the mental edge for him when the matriarch of his family dies under questionable circumstances.

Some interesting camera and lensing choices are the slow push in that occurs in the opening scene and the focus to out-of-focus to focus shot where the academic recounts the incident that caused him to leave and return to Turkey; both approaches visually emphasize the dramatic important of what is being said. A vicious act occurs that resembles something out of the movie Greed but it comes across as a head-scratcher rather than a plot-altering moment.

Check out all of our Sundance coverage

The difficulties from the job in peril and the fertility crisis feel like the means to simply tighten the mental screw of the protagonist. What is the most interesting narrative is the unraveling the questionable death of the mother and the toxic consequences of a male-dominated society on women, especially in the domestic realm. The trouble lies in filmmaker Alireza Khatami focusing on creating twists which is something that has plagued M. Night Shyamalan over the years.

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival takes place January 23 to February 2, 2025, in person and online, and for more information visit sundance.org.

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada; he can be found at LinkedIn.

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