Author-director Alireza Khatami is thought for a pair of semi-experimental dramas — 2017’s Oblivion Verses and 2023’s Terrestrial Verses (co-directed with Ali Asgari) — the place he continuously toys with storytelling methods, inserting flashes of surreal imagery with out warning, or counting on a mysteriously indirect viewpoint to relate the motion. If the content material of his movies skews in direction of the darkish facet, their type tends to be a bit extra playful, undercutting a number of the heaviness of what’s being depicted.
In The Issues You Kill, the brooding story of a school professor dealing with main upheavals on two dwelling fronts will get belied by a plot that slides into violent absurdity. What begins off as a staid and naturalistic drama, a few man experiencing a midlife disaster following the demise of his mom, veers into Buñuel or De Palma territory within the latter half. Identities are swapped, our bodies are dropped and every little thing appears out of whack. That’s, till Khatami tries to tie issues collectively with out a lot clarification.
The Issues You Kill
The Backside Line
Intriguing if emotionally staid, with just a few loopy twists.
Venue: Sundance Movie Pageant (World Cinema Dramatic Competitors)
Solid: Ekin Koç, Erkan Koçak Köstendil, Hazar Ergüclü, Ercan Kesal
Director-screenwriter: Alireza Khatami
1 hour 53 minutes
The movie is actually divided into two components. Within the first, we comply with the quotidian travails of Ali (Ekin Koç), a translation instructor who lived within the U.S. for years and has returned dwelling to work in his native Turkey, the place he offers courses part-time job at a public college. Married to svelte veterinarian Hazar (Hazar Ergüclü), with whom he’s been desperately attempting to have a child, Ali learns two pivotal issues early on: his sperm depend is significantly low, and his growing old mom can now not maintain herself.
The parallel plotlines involving Ali’s potential descendants and problematic antecedents, together with a father (Ercan Kesal) who appears to be significantly abusive in direction of his spouse, collide in extremely uncommon methods through the film’s risky second half. At that time, a wayfarer named Reza (Erkan Koçak Köstendil) pops into the image, displaying up at Ali’s cabin within the hills outdoors city and providing up his providers as a gardener. However as we quickly be taught, Reza does way more than merely water the vegetation.
If the opening half hour of The Issues You Kill performs out like a slow-burn household saga paying homage to the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Kesal is an everyday collaborator of the Turkish auteur) it lacks dramatic endurance and drags alongside at instances. Film protagonists don’t at all times must be likable, however Ali is a lot of a pretentious curmudgeon that his fall from grace, which incorporates the information he might lose his instructing job because of finances cuts, doesn’t precisely transfer us. He treats everybody with an undercurrent of disdain, and appears to remorse transferring again to Turkey after what appeared like a extra fruitful life in America.
It’s due to this fact considerably of a aid to see the professor get put by the wringer within the latter half of the narrative, when, following his mom’s sudden demise and the suspicions that his father could also be accountable, The Issues You Kill jaggedly shifts into thriller mode. With out spoiling an excessive amount of, let’s simply say that Ali and Reza — two names that, when joined collectively, spell the director’s personal first title — resolve to take issues into their very own arms, resulting in a bloody denouement with echoes of each James M. Cain and the Coen brothers. The drama does ultimately come full circle, but it surely’s gone to date off the rails by that time that it’s arduous to deliver us again.
Like in his earlier work, Khatami defies conference right here, and that’s very a lot to his credit score. The early scenes of The Issues You Kill presage a quiet chamber piece, which the director utterly upends as soon as the homicide story takes over. He additionally reveals a deft eye for composition, framing characters by home windows or doorways to higher underline the film-within-a-film facets of the narrative, and leaving us to marvel: Are we witnessing actuality, or some type of film that’s taking part in inside Ali’s head?
As a lot as that may make for an intriguingly deconstructed viewing expertise, emotionally talking the movie stays a bit stale. Khatami actually has loads to say, particularly in regards to the crushing results of the male hierarchy on each a private {and professional} degree. However there’s one thing about The Issues You Kill that finally leaves the viewer chilly, even when all of the unusual and terrible stuff Ali goes by leads him to lastly open up and, maybe, loosen up.
