The Things You Kill

Reaping what you sow, as a concept, stretches all the way back to the apostle Paul and Galatians—maybe further—but it gets an interesting twist in this film about Ali, a university professor who spirals into a dissociative rage after his mother’s suspicious death and eventually recruits a near-otherworldly gardener named Reza as a vessel to exact revenge. That is the sowing. The reaping comes once the violence unearths family secrets and refracts Ali’s reality, a multitude of selves and shadow selves planted in the dark and fecund soil of his soul, waiting to see which will take root. It’s a disquieting, multilayered parable—another thing with a long history that feels new in this smart, thought-provoking story.