It Was Just an Accident (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is more than just a film – it’s a righteous act of defiance. But that’s par for the course for director Jafar Panahi, who for 30 years has been among Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers, and has been imprisoned for making movies critical of his country’s religious and governmental systems. For years, Panahi had been legally banned from making films in Iran. But that never stopped him from writing and directing searing neorealist tragicomic thrillers like It Was Just an Accident, which he made after the ban lifted, but he nevertheless shot on the sly, guerilla-style, without permits or permission, resulting in further legal troubles. The film enjoyed a surprise debut at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Palme d’Or – for good reason, because it’s one of the year’s most engrossing and unforgettable films.
The Gist: Nighttime. An unnamed man (Ebrahim Azizi) drives his pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and their young daughter (Delnaz Najafi) along a dark road. The car jolts with a thump and a dog’s whine. He pulls over, moves the dying dog and then continues to drive until the car sputters and dies. He gets help from a kind man who gets the car running again, but not before Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) feels a horrible jolt of recognition. The man walks with a distinctive limp, and Vahid recognizes his voice. The next day, Vahid tracks the man down. Pulls his van up next to him. Opens the door and knocks him down. Whacks him with a shovel just to be sure.
Cut to a remote, empty stretch of desert. Vahid digs a hole, dust kicking up all around him. He drags the man, tied-up and blindfolded, out of the van and puts him in the hole and starts burying him. Unsurprisingly, the man protests. Vahid looks at the man’s ID: “Wasn’t Eghbal a good enough name?”, he spits. Vahid is certain this is Eghbal the Peg Leg, the man who tortured him while he was a political prisoner. Also unsurprisingly, the man denies it. Granted, Vahid was blindfolded during those grueling months. The sound of his voice, the telltale squeak of his prosthetic leg – it has to be Eghbal. Right? An expression of doubt crosses Vahid’s face. He pulls the man out of the hole. Gags him. Locks him in the large wooden toolbox in the van. And drives back to Tehran.
Vahid visits Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), who wants nothing to do with this. “This is unlike you,” Salar says. “He took my dignity, he took my wife, he took my job,” Vahid replies. Vahid deals with chronic kidney pain from the torture. Salar sends Vahid to Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer who also was one of Eghbal’s prisoners, except she called him “The Gimp.” Can she help identify Eghbal for certain? She too was blindfolded. Shiva happens to be photographing Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), also a former prisoner, as she wears a wedding dress with her tuxedoed fiancee Ali (Majid Panahi). When Goli learns who’s in the back of the van, she nearly faints – then flies into a rage. She wants to yell at, hurt, kill, do something to the guy who traumatized her. But nobody’s 100 percent certain they have the right guy. They track down Shiva’s ex, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr). He’s a bit of a loose cannon. Loud. Brash. Confrontational. You’ll want to sock him one. He closes his eyes and feels the scars on the man’s leg and is certain it’s Eghbal the Peg Leg. Certain. The whole crew, wildly upset, lugging cameras, wearing wedding dresses, bickering, piles into the van. Vihad drives them out to the desert and – now what?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Anatomy of a Fall meets Good Time as It Was Just an Accident skewers a country’s punitive moral and legal policies over the course of a single harrowing day.
Performance Worth Watching: Mobasseri is exquisitely present for every moment Panahi presents to him, from the understated comedy (the actor’s physical performance is subtly brilliant) to the grueling psychological drama.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: The quietly comic scenario of these people in this vehicle squabbling about the ethical quandary they find themselves in is quite the can of worms: They maybe feel like they want to exact revenge via torture or murder. But can they, as average citizens of sturdy moral conscience, really go through with it? Are they privy to the weaknesses of cruel men like Eghbal? Is revenge ever truly justified or, you know, “sweet”? Do they bury the guy or force him to confess or just let him go? Do they blame the man or the system that made him what he is? If they let him go, will he exact his own revenge? And what if he’s not the right guy?
Panahi stages the drama over roughly 24 hours fraught with tension, among Vihad and his fellow former prisoners; between the collective and the Man Who May or May Not Be Eghbal the Peg Leg; amidst all of these people and their own consciences. The narrative pushes these characters through an array of surprising developments that might stretch credibility a bit – the plot tends to be an unusual and tightly packed confluence of events – but functions as a fraught but never overt thought experiment colored with the specificities of Iranian culture.
And those specificities are what render It Was Just an Accident so thoughtful, so grimly comic, and eventually so devastating: How many people did this guy torture anyway? There seems to be one on every other street corner. The wedding dress, worn even when the riders in the van have to get out and push after Vihad runs out of gas, is a running joke, but also symbolic of its wearer’s psychology – she’s getting married the next day, but her ghastly imprisonment clearly trumps the wedding as the defining moment of her life. So is Vihad’s need to routinely dole out bribes as the group navigates the city, with a smiling nurse asking him to “make a gift or make a scandal,” and a pair of security guards producing a wireless credit card swiper in case one doesn’t have cash to pay them to look the other way.
On paper, such borderline-ridiculous moments might clash with the harsh realities Panahi dramatizes, but they sure feel like accurate reflections of life in modern-day Iran, life that the filmmaker has surely endured firsthand. The country’s day-to-day petty corruption mirrors the day-to-day horrors of the overarching political structures. Again: How many people has the regime traumatized, directly through physical violence or indirectly through threats and intimidation? They’re everywhere, truly. Panahi stages the lengthy final shots of It Was Just an Accident as horror still lifes of a sort, and those scenes are emotionally and thematically locked in, and unforgettable. As hard as we may have laughed earlier, we are exponentially more devastated as the credits quietly roll.
Our Call: Again, devastating. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.