It Was Just an Accident
by George Wolf
Driving home one night with his wife and daughter, a man strikes and kills a stray dog that runs into the road. It is simply an accident, an innocent mishap.
But accidents and innocence are seldom part of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s intricate parables, and 2025 Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident quickly becomes the latest searing indictment of injustice and corruption in his homeland.
After hitting the dog, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) takes his car in for service. At the shop, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) instantly thinks he recognizes Eghbal as the intelligence officer who brutalized Vahid and his fellow political prisoners years before.
Vahid kidnaps Eghbal and is on the verge of killing him, when doubt creeps into his mind. Loading the unconscious Eghbal in the back of his van, Vahid heads out to find his fellow ex-inmates and some help in an airtight identification. The compatriots (including a bride, a groom, and a wedding photographer) react with a mixture and rage and uncertainty, and their travel over the course of one day allows Panahi to organically detail the abuse they once suffered and the casual corruption they still navigate daily.
This is the first film for Panahi (No Bears, Taxi, Closed Curtain) since Iran lifted his decade-long filmmaking and travel ban, and while he’s no longer filming himself in secret, Panahi’s storytelling still bursts with intimacy and courage.
The first rate ensemble makes the anger palpable, and Panahi masterfully weaves it into the mystery surrounding Eghbal’s guilt to create a thriller of simmering tension, comic sidebars and complex moralities.
If Eghbal is indeed their tormentor, is vengeance justified? And even if it is, would mercy actually bring them more peace?
True to form, Panahi closes with a shot that seems to close one chapter and open another, and the fade to black may require a few minutes to decompress.
But that’s the kind of effect Panahi’s films can have. It Was Just an Accident is more proof that he is one of the true modern-day masters, with a clear and distinctive voice that demands attention.
