‘The Things You Kill’ movie review: Alireza Khatami’s shape-shifting psychological thriller dismantles the myth of the self-aware man

Having spent much of his filmmaking career navigating the practical and ideological constraints of state censorship, Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami has developed an elastic relationship with geography. His previous features — Oblivion Verses , produced in Chile and spoken in Spanish, and Terrestrial Verses , co-directed with Ali Asgari inside Iran — had already exposed national borders as institutions far better at policing artists than restricting the ideas those artists smuggle across. His latest work, The Things You Kill, extends that philosophy by transplanting a script originally written in Farsi into an unnamed Turkish city after Iranian censorship made its original setting untenable. But the relocation feels more than a mere cosmetic disguise because Khatami has built the film around the very instability of translation and identity, making the history of its production inextricable from the drama unfolding on screen.