Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against the raging of tyranny as much as a film that unflinchingly wrestles with the moral dilemmas this tyranny engenders, It Was Just an Accident finds the long-time dissident against Iran’s Islamist regime working in a more explicit and even openly defiant register compared to his previous works. Having been imprisoned twice and slapped with an ongoing filmmaking ban, Panahi is no stranger to the paranoia he dramatizes so vividly in the film’s setup: a vehicular breakdown prompting family man Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) to stop by a mechanic whose assistant, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognizes him as his captor and torturer. But Rashid, or Eqbal the “Peg Leg,” is, for the most part, contrite if insistent on his innocence, when he isn’t kept comatose and locked up in the back of Vahid’s van. His discovery and detention were accidental; what to do with him is a matter of serious and difficult deliberation.
Equal parts thriller and political drama, It Was Just an Accident potently documents the travails of retributive justice. Its influences may be literary, such as when the hesitation underpinning its extrajudicial process is compared to Beckett’s Godot, and the film’s characters may, to its detractors, be reduced to ideological conduits. Yet Panahi’s urgency and realism shine through his metaphysical terrain of good and evil. When Vahid informs his friend and erstwhile regime victim Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh) about his intention to off Rashid, Salar urges grace while directing the vengeful man towards Shiva (Maryam Afshari), a wedding photographer midway through a shoot with bride Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and groom Ali (Majid Panahi). Both women were personally tortured by the Peg Leg, and both are torn between denying the dredging up of this painful past and determining Rashid’s identity beyond earthly doubt. Shiva’s ex-boyfriend, the impulsive and utterly furious Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), is also enlisted, making Vahid look positively stoic in comparison and threatening to derail the stab at due process that would arbitrate between righteous killing and wrongful martyrdom.
Neither legality nor even ambiguity, however, informs the film’s crux — and though the hip logorrhea of Anatomy of a Fall might have entranced many, Panahi’s precepts are simpler but consequently more terrifying. On the surface, powerful in its own right, It Was Just an Accident paints a staid if affecting portrait of vigilantism, its fantastical catharsis deflated in the moment of absolute agency. At a deeper and more unnerving level, the contingency of its narrative enterprise provides a radical critique of this agency. The God that Rashid unsuccessfully assuages his young daughter with at the film’s start sets nothing in stone, and His fickleness in precipitating the civilians’ wild goose chase for truth and closure pits both objectives, on occasion, against each other. The open wounds that a reign of terror perpetuates, nonetheless, necessarily remain open: where the film’s penultimate sequence, a confessional tour de force, offers some much-needed reprieve, its chilling final shot might have just foreclosed it indefinitely. Sparse, naked, and blistering, It Was Just an Accident may be Panahi’s most invigorating film yet.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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