In its original title, Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” calls its titular mishap “simple.” But his films observe no such thing as mere happenstance. It is late at night, and Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and daughter (Delmaz Najafi) home just as a classic trope unfolds: they run over a loose animal whose silhouette was made invisible by a heavy curtain of darkness. The dead dog, it turns out, would not only ruin the car’s engine but also kickstart the series of events at the heart of the director’s classically refined drama.
It’s been 22 years since the Iranian auteur walked the Cannes red carpet, the last time being for Un Certain Regard-winning thriller “Crimson Gold.” Seven years after that, Panahi would be convicted of “propaganda against the state” of Iran and banned from filmmaking for two decades. Of course, this has not stopped the director who has made some of the greatest works in a great career in the fifteen years since that conviction. Films from this period include “This Is Not a Film,” the first feature post-ban and an intimate, personal look at the limitations and possibilities of creative and political censorship, and “Taxi,” where Panahi once again steps in front of the camera, this time as a cab driver roaming the streets of his native Tehran, straddling two identities, both conductors of a seemingly controllable yet often ungovernable machine.
READ MORE: Cannes 2025 Most Anticipated Films: ‘Sentimental Value,’ ‘Eddington,’ ‘Die My Love’
“It Was Just an Accident” is a return to a more classic style of filmmaking, but continues to hold a steady mirror to the director. This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it. Such anger is a long river that bifurcates into two opposing forces: violence and empathy. These are also two fundamental pillars of revenge, for only those painfully aware of the consequences of sheer apathy can nurture the patience of the vengeful, and only those who have once felt the piping hot wave of unjustified violence can find a way to justify it.
Vahid (Vahid Mubasseri) is stuck somewhere between the two. Those around him call him Jughead, his arm made handle thanks to how it permanently grabs at a mangled back. The same night Eghbal runs over the dog, Vahid gets a fateful call. Their paths cross, not for the first time. The mechanic, charged with stripping away dead dog flesh from the burning metal of the man’s dented car, would never be able to forget the voice of his former captor. The fact that he had a prominent feature of a prosthetic leg helps, too. Peg Leg, they called him.
Reunited with the man who ruined his life, Vahid must decide, so he picks up a shovel and gets to work. But this is a Panahi film, and therefore much knottier than your run-of-the-mill revenge thriller. Vahid may be angry, but he is just. Could life really have allowed him to hurt his great nemesis on a silver platter? Could destiny be at once this cruel and poetic? His questions are at once existential and practical and, to be able to make a decision that will both quench his thirst for revenge and appease his moral compass, the mechanic goes knocking on the door of the only people who would be able to help him with this question: those who once shared the same barren cells.
Very few filmmakers understand the absurd nature of totalitarianism like the Iranian director, who knows that despair often walks hand in hand with the foolish. As he follows the mismatched group of former regime captives, Panahi repeatedly plays into the comical, from harnessing the natural goofiness of a puffy wedding dress to mocking how openly and nonchalantly Iranian figures of authority demand bribes — in one of the film’s funniest scenes, two parking lot security guards pull out a debit card machine from their pockets. No cash? No problem.
But despite the blitheness of such passages, as it approaches its stunning final scene — the greatest of any film this year — the director zooms in on Vahid and Eghbal, both drenched in red light, the same darkness that brought the two together in the first place falling like a shroud as their confrontation comes to an apex. “I had a guilty conscience but became used to it with time,” the captor tells his former captive. And one of the great beauties of “It Was Just an Accident” and Panahi’s work is how it refuses to bend to that very same time, growing louder and angrier and clearer, for there is no such thing as revenge when the chopped head falls not to the ground but rebuilds and remains as a hydra. [A]
