The Things You Kill Ending Explained And Movie Recap: Who Is Reza?

The fractured identity of a man has been the contender of many discussions; why does a man, after all, become someone who he was not? Is this new identity truly new, something that the man crafts from scratch, or is it something very, very old that has remained dormant inside him for a long time, waiting for the right wake-up call? At this point, double identities are not only psychological, like Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde but they have broadened to include borders, countries, language, and even the past and present of a man as causes for this split. While most films are comfortable picking any one of the factors to show the split between identity, Alireza Khatami’s bold attempt at storytelling situates the protagonist Ali at an intersection of more than one element. Ali’s switch into his other personality, Reza (which is also a clever play on the auteur’s name, Ali/Reza), is prompted by a deep psychological wound from the past, an aspiration to become more than what he is in the present, and the distinct dilemma of a man who crossed borders into a foreign land staying a different version across space and time. While the slow-burn thriller has a lean revenge plot to drive it, its characterization is what really makes the film stand out. Let’s break down this transition from Ali to Reza and why this happens.

Spoilers Ahead

Ali, an intellectual professor in his early forties, left Iran for America to study comparative literature. However, he returned to start teaching at the university, got married to Hazar, and is now living a quiet life. In the beginning, Ali is a soft-hearted husband, a diligent son who takes care of his mother, and quite a philosophical professor pushing the boundaries of the classroom to teach his students the essence of their subject. In a translation class, he speaks about the Arabic etymological core of the word “to translate,” which translates to “to kill.” While translating a word or a phrase, the old meaning of the source text has to die away to produce a new meaning in the translated text. The two, while synonymous, are never the same thing. Each language unit, in its essence, is untranslatable. Ali’s lecture is about the philosophy of the film and his eventual transformation.After his mother’s sudden death in an accident, Ali becomes more convinced by the day that his father had to do something with her death. He speaks with his sisters and other people to gain just a little more information about the night. When Ali’s sister tells him about his father’s abusive tendencies, Ali seems like he was waiting for this one kernel of truth to confirm his bias. Ali then unearths more information trying to chalk down the anatomy of her mother’s death and becomes convinced that his father is to be held responsible for it. Ali decides to avenge his mother.

Meanwhile, Ali and his wife, Hazer, have been struggling to conceive. It is due to Ali’s low sperm count, but he hides this fact from Hazer. Ali struggles with the idea of fatherhood in a two-pronged way—his father has been an unreliable model for him to follow, and in his own life, he is unable to become the version of a father that he idealizes. While his infertility may be a physiological factor, it also feels like a psychological blockage since the image of the fatherhood that he knows is so violent that he cannot usher that into his own life. Except if he really gives in to the violence. 

At the core of abuse lies violence. To avenge his abusive father, Ali chooses the same weapon of suppressed grief, rage, and violence. However, this does not break out of Ali organically; it is catalyzed by Reza’s arrival. In turn, Ali will become him. Perhaps, Reza is Ali’s projection, or perhaps it is what Ali had always been deep inside.

Ali has a garden distant from his house which looks more like a barren field and does not grow into fruition; this is strangely symbolic of Ali’s current state. Ali goes to sit and ponder in this barren land often, and one day he meets Reza, who just wanders in to help him with the garden. He wants to become a gardener; when Ali asks him about his gardening experience, he says that his experience is definitely more than what Ali knows. So Reza is everything that Ali is not; he is willing enough to skip town to find a garden he would like to grow.Reza is also not scared to ask for the money he deserves and overall seems unafraid of possibilities. 

With Reza’s help, Ali buries his father alive. But once the burial is complete, it is Reza who becomes Ali, while Ali is chained in the dog’s cabin. This resonates with the film’s ethos of translation—Ali and Reza are synonymous, but they are not quite the same. Reza becomes Ali after killing his old self, tying it down in the garden, and coming home as the abrasive, fierce person that always lived inside of him. In psychoanalysis, there is a key concept of coming of age where the subject has to identify with the name of his father or the values that his father represents in his subconscious. Perhaps, Ali’s coming of age is only complete when he too identifies with the violence that generationally lay buried in the men of his family. While generational violence is cyclical and inexcusable, the roots of it are complex. In a way, learning about the genesis of this violence is able to turn Reza back into Ali. 

Ali (who is now Reza) goes to visit his aunt in the hospital, who describes an incident about his grandfather hitting his father in childhood. It turns out, Ali’s grandfather was also an abusive man; the violence came to his father and then to Ali not as one-off events, but through psychological inheritance. Right after this visit, Ali (Reza) drives to his father’s burial spot and finds the dead body gone. It is as if the heavy weight of buried secrets regarding his father has disappeared with the one statement that explains his violence and, in turn, lets Ali make sense of his own violent act. After this, he goes to release Ali. Chained Ali overpowers Reza and strangles him with the chain, assuming his old personality. Shortly after, he is met by his wife, Hazer, and the two make love—a symbol of rebirth in this cycle of violence and death.

Ali wants to sell his father’s house; for a person dealing with trauma, the site of that trauma (here the house) becomes the most triggering. Selling the house would make it possible that he becomes a father by going abroad and availing the sperm bank for Hazer. Or perhaps, dissolving the existence of the house where his father was the abuser enables him to embrace fatherhood on his own terms. In any case, we see Ali in an emptied house at night as he hears a knock on the door. When he opens the door, he sees his father, his scar on the face that he received from his father bleeding. He wants to come in; he wants to rest. If you remember, this is the same dream that Hazer speaks about at the very beginning of the film. Ali lets his father in and lets him sleep on the floor as he asks Ali to turn off the lights. In this sequence, there are not one but two reconciliations, the first being Ali and Hazer’s—their dreams have finally merged into one; it is a unified vision of acceptance, rest, and embracing fatherhood. The other reconciliation is of Ali and his father, in the truth that binds them. While Ali’s father comes back to rest at his own house, he is not only a formidable abuser but also a child whose scars haven’t healed. In this house, and also in Ali’s mind, he wants to finally rest. Or is it Ali who is finally able to put his father to rest and turn off the lights so he never has to look into that room of his mind again? “Becoming” is a strange verb. In his later life, Ali’s father took on a lover and became gentle, providing support for her that he never could for his mother. Perhaps Ali’s trajectory is similar—post-violence he receives his catharsis and is ready to become the father that Hazer wants him to be. 

Alireza Khatami’s commentary on identities through fragments has been a strong element in his co-auteured Cannes feature “Terrestrial Verses” with Ali Asghari. While that was deeply political, this pulls the focus back to human history and how it is lived through one person but is expansive enough to hold testimony to all of it, just like his previous film. 

“The Things You Kill” ultimately argues that identity is never born in a vacuum, but it is inherited, translated, and then violently rewritten in the process. Khatami’s most radical gesture is not writing the act of revenge itself, but in defining what follows it. By tracing violence backward, from son to father to grandfather, the film refuses the fantasy of moral exceptionalism, establishing that identities are shaped by inheritance. It is not singular or stable in this film, but it is a site of struggle between what we know of the past and what we want to imagine anew. In the end, becoming whole does not mean killing the self you were, but understanding it well enough to let it finally rest.