Review: Revenge dramedy ‘It Was Just An Accident’ finds humor and humanity in the unexpected
2025 / Dir. Jafar Panahi
☆ 4.5/5
Watch if you like: Taste of Cherry, A Separation, and pretending you’re cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation and you kidnap Chevy Chase’s boss but you’re not sure it’s him so you spend all day driving around with him in your van.
In Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning new film, It Was Just An Accident, a serendipitous event potentially reunites a formerly incarcerated man with his government torturer, sending him on an increasingly ridiculous goose chase to make sure he has the right guy before enacting his vengeance.
Beginning with a family driving down a pitch black road, a father (Ebrahim Azizi) struggles with exhaustion and an overactive young daughter who wants to listen to loud dance music that’s clearly getting on his nerves. It’s a cute scene that sets this up as a family like any other. When the distracted dad accidentally kills an unseen animal that jumps in front of his car, they make a detour to a garage run by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is terrified at the sound of the father’s squeaky prosthetic leg. This is a sound etched into his brain from years of unwarranted imprisonment and torture at the hands of a man named Eghbal, whose face he never saw due to constantly being blindfolded.
Vahid obsessively tracks the man down, knocks him unconscious, and plans to bury him alive until “Eghbal” creates enough doubt in Vahid’s mind that he may not be the infamous government torturer after all. Thus launches the bulk of the film that sets Vahid on a journey requiring him to reach out and assemble an ever-growing group of people who were tortured at the hands of Eghbal, until soon he has a photographer, a bride and groom in full wedding attire, and a disgruntled laborer on a quest to find the truth and determine what justice is to be delivered.
Despite the dark subject matter, It Was Just An Accident is surprisingly entertaining and often quite funny. Panahi focuses on the humanity and growing bonds of these very different people, all struggling to deal with losing years of their lives to an authoritarian government, as they encounter various obstacles. One of the funniest is being stopped by two security guards who demand a bribe and, when no one has cash, pull out a credit card reader.
The director—himself the subject of repeated imprisonments and travel bans over the last 15 years at the hands of an authoritarian government—explores the different responses the group has to potential revenge and the push-pull of retaining one’s humanity or succumbing to the very same impulses as their oppressors. The decision to show two of its central female characters without the hijab after the Mahsa Amini protests, which saw no surface-level change to the regime while also deeply awakening Iran’s people, certainly tips the audience off to where Panahi’s head is at.
It Was Just An Accident is not just a masterpiece from a filmmaker seemingly liberated, but a vital testament to the power of continuing to remain human and decent in a world that’s increasingly anything but.