In The Issues You Kill, the brand new movie from Toronto-based Iranian director Alireza Khatami, a harrowing occasion of femicide serves as a mirror to a society buckling below the burden of patriarchy. The unnerving psychological thriller—Canada’s submission for finest worldwide characteristic movie at subsequent yr’s Academy Awards—follows Ali, a literature professor reeling from his mom’s suspicious dying, who, within the strategy of confronting the poisonous masculinity round him, as a substitute turns into ensnared in it.
Khatami’s meditation on gender, household, and energy was initially set in modern Iran however moved to Turkey when Khatami confronted points with Iran’s censorship workplace. Sadly, a lot of it interprets all too effectively, arriving as Turkey’s authoritarian chief, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reasserting conventional gender norms below the banner of so-called household values.
Looming over Erdogan’s “yr of the household” is a sustained assault on feminists in Turkey. Since being elected president in 2014, Erdogan has stated girls can’t be handled as equal to males, accused feminists of rejecting Islam’s particular function for moms, and branded girls who forgo motherhood as “poor” and “half individuals.” In 2021, he withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Conference, the world’s first binding treaty to stop violence in opposition to girls.
The unsurprising results of this politics of resentment has been an uptick in homicides in opposition to girls. We Will Cease Femicides Platform, a female-led NGO that paperwork femicides in Turkey, reported that males murdered 394 girls in Turkey in 2024, whereas 259 girls died below suspicious circumstances. It was the best variety of femicides because the group began maintaining the information in 2010.
In opposition to this backdrop—and even in opposition to that of Khatami’s residence nation of Iran, the place girls’s rights are severely restricted, there are not any legal guidelines stopping home abuse, and femicides additionally look like on the rise—the portrait of 1 man’s unraveling turns into a parable for a broader disaster. The Issues You Kill examines the poisoned masculinity that sons inherit from their fathers and the false salvation promised by the ideology of the manosphere. This situation fractures the self, making males conscious sufficient to acknowledge this cycle, but powerless to cease themselves from repeating it.
In Turkey, my homeland, that is an ongoing wrestle. From beginning, younger males are assigned roles outlined by patriarchy. They’re anticipated to be authoritative, suppress their feelings, and keep away from vulnerability, lest they be dismissed as weak or mushy. The movie asks, then, what it will take to interrupt this sample—for males to step out of their fathers’ shadows and redefine manhood as one thing much less violent and extra humane.
Movie nonetheless from The Issues You Kill. Cineverse
Ali looks as if the sort of man who would chafe in opposition to the straitjacket of Turkish household values. Delicate-spoken, considerate, and articulate, he doesn’t discuss or stroll like a macho Turk. After having spent 14 years finding out in the US, he now lectures on literary translation at Ankara’s Gazi College. However all that point and distance weren’t sufficient to protect Ali from his father’s poisonous shadow.
We watch Ali look after his ailing mom, Melahat, whose home has fallen into disarray. Melahat notes how he’s “identical to” his father as he factors to issues that want altering. When his father, Hamit, arrives, tensions flare—“That is my home!” Hamit shouts. Ali, portrayed in a virtuoso efficiency by Ekin Koc, fears he’s destined to inherit his father’s cruelty, regardless of his efforts in exile to grow to be a special kind of man.
No matter stability Ali possessed collapses at some point when Hamit calls to say Melahat is useless—discovered face-down and unresponsive of their residence. Ali has a disturbing thought: May his father have killed his mom? “She was extra slave than your spouse!” Ali shouts at his father in fury.
Ali’s twin failures—to guard his mom and to conceive a toddler along with his spouse, Hazar—converge right into a singular self-loathing. He begins sleeping on the sofa, crying via the night time. Although educated in literature, Ali refuses to articulate his resentment and unhappiness over what he sees as his rising resemblance to his father. Like most males, he wants remedy. Like most males, he wells up his emotions as a substitute.
Ali seeks solace in his backyard, which is positioned removed from his and Hazar’s condo. There he meets Reza, a parched traveler who asks for water. When Ali asks the place he’s from, Reza solutions cryptically, “The north.” At first, Reza is simply one other reminder of Ali’s incompetence, scolding Ali for a way poorly he has tended his backyard. However Reza’s presence is alluring to Ali. He’s single, childless, claims to be a Harvard graduate, and affords wise-sounding recommendation: “Nobody in life is resentful from beginning,” and, “Legal guidelines are for the poor.” Seemingly unaffected by expectations of wokeness, he’s the sort of man who would appear at residence within the manosphere in the present day.
Ali hires Reza to have a tendency the backyard and fingers over the keys to his shed. As his lodger, Reza even wears Ali’s outdated garments. Unusually, nobody else appears conscious of his existence. As Reza’s presence in Ali’s life grows, the literature professor turns into obsessive about uncovering the reality about his mom’s dying, piecing collectively proof of abuse that occurred whereas he was overseas.
Halfway via, the movie takes a Lynchian flip, and actuality begins to unravel. Reza overtakes Ali—actually—chaining him to a doghouse and feeding him water from a bowl. The world doesn’t appear to note the change, and folks deal with Reza as Ali. And in contrast to Ali, whose tragic flaw is his incapacity to take decisive motion, Reza acts: bribing officers for permission to drill a effectively, revealing Ali’s infertility to Hazar, and redirecting his inheritance for fertility therapy abroad.
Years in the past, I translated The Unusual Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a Turkish writer. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella follows a decent man who leads a double life by scientifically separating the great and evil sides of himself. As a Victorian gentleman, Jekyll yearns for freedom from societal restraint, and his alter ego indulges in promiscuity, extreme ingesting, and different vices that might in any other case break his fame.
Khatami’s movie hums with comparable stress. But he identifies the supply not as repressed urges however as one thing inherited, a cycle that has but to be damaged. Earlier than Ali can reclaim his life from Reza, he learns that his father had been a mild boy who was mentally and bodily scarred by his personal violent father. That wound, handed down via generations, turns into the movie’s haunting chorus: the sins of the daddy repeating, every act of violence begetting one other, in an infinite loop.
A father reaches out a hand to his son as they stroll in Ankara, Turkey, on Sept. 26, 2017.Altan Gocher/NurPhoto by way of Getty Photographs
Khatami’s cinema has at all times been haunted by the struggles—and silencing—of girls. His debut characteristic, Oblivion Verses (2017), follows a Chilean morgue caretaker who discovers the physique of a younger lady killed by authorities and tries to provide her a correct burial.
The Issues You Kill builds on that preoccupation, and it’s troublesome to grasp it totally with out the context of Terrestrial Verses (2023), Khatami’s movie—co-directed with Ali Asgari—that captured the temper of Tehran within the wake of the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and unsettled me greater than every other movie I’ve seen this decade. Throughout a sequence of vignettes, Terrestrial Verses exhibits Iranians being obstructed by their authorities, revealing in wonderful element how authoritarianism seeps into the mundane: A person should strip and reveal his tattoos to obtain a driver’s license; a lady endures the humiliation of her boss’s advances throughout a job interview; a father is barred from naming his new child David as a result of doing so would “propagate international tradition”; a younger lady is punished for driving and not using a scarf, regardless that her brother was behind the wheel.
In its penultimate vignette, a authorities official scolds a filmmaker named Ali for writing a script titled The Issues You Kill. The official claims Ali has insulted a father character by portraying him as violent. “You possibly can’t enable a father to be killed in your script,” he warns, reflecting the regime’s best worry—the youth rising up in opposition to their patriarchs. When Ali defends the custom of patricide in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, the officer scolds Ali for making Western references at a time when “we’re making an attempt to cease the cultural hegemony of the West.” (Ali’s reply, “You’re simply stopping my movie, not the West,” is a cracker.)
Ali ultimately agrees to chop the references to home violence and patricide, leaving him with half of his unique script. Maybe, the officer suggests, he ought to inform a narrative from the Qur’an as a substitute. Ali refuses the officer’s propositions. “I’m writing my life story right here,” he says.
Certainly, the movie of the identical title that Khatami went on to make was initially written to happen and be filmed in Tehran, however Khatami needed to change plans. After the success of Terrestrial Verses at Cannes, Asgari was quickly banned by the Iranian authorities from leaving the nation and directing movies. Khatami, in the meantime, couldn’t settle for eradicating the components of the script that handled patricide because the censors demanded. As an alternative of modifying his script, he had the unique translated from Farsi into Turkish and rewrote the story for a Turkish setting.
It happens to me that cultural translation—throughout languages, identities, and selves—is essential to understanding The Issues You Kill, a movie that rewards a number of viewings with its multi-layered script. In an early scene, Ali lectures on numerous etymologies of the phrase “translation.” In English, he explains, the phrase comes from the Latin translatio, with trans that means “throughout” whereas latio derives from latus, the previous participle of ferre, which suggests “to hold.” However in Turkish, the phrase for translation, tercume, is rooted in mutercim, to interpret. A scholar, nevertheless, tells Ali to consider one other Persian root. Recm means “to stone, to curse, to kill” in Farsi. On this interpretation, for a brand new time period to exist, a earlier model must be murdered.
Khatami deftly explores the dilemma of masculinity at play throughout societies, recognizing that it isn’t merely a selection between toxicity and advantage. Ali is torn between his soft-spoken but ineffectual self and Reza, his aggressive but succesful double. Collectively, their names kind Alireza, the primary title of Khatami himself. Ali’s wrestle means that true progress could lie not in killing sure components of ourselves however in merging these selves collectively. Solely by reconciling these opposing forces can he obtain self-confidence rooted in empathy, self-knowledge, and altruism, as a substitute of insecurity, repression, and aggression.
It’s not a revolutionary thought, however it’s a name for revolution in how males in patriarchal societies—whether or not in Iran, Turkey, or the West—conceive of their private and political futures. It’s a plea to interrupt the cycle of misogyny, homophobia, and violent domination that has outlined modern manhood, not simply in relationships however in societies writ massive. In any other case, masculinity will grow to be a nightmare from which no man can wake.
