It Was Just an Accident Is Jafar Panahi's Suspenseful and Human Search for Answers

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For more than six months across 2022 and 2023, director Jafar Panahi was imprisoned in Iran. The filmmaker, who began as a protege of Abbas Kiarostami, was originally sentenced in 2010 for his support of the Iranian Green Movement – although he would not go to prison for a dozen years after sentencing, the Islamic Republic of Iran banned him from filmmaking, traveling, and speaking to the international press for 20 years, effectively immediately.

Since then, Panahi’s films have been made in secret, working around the conditions of his sentence but always confronting them head-on: the provocatively-titled This is Not a Film documents his house arrest in Tehran; Taxi features the director posing as a cab driver, recording conversations with his passengers on a dash cam; No Bears is about a director remotely directing a film about Iranians fleeing the country after years of criticizing the government – Panahi cast himself as the director.

It Was Just an Accident is Panahi’s first film since being released from prison (where he had gone on a hunger strike) and it unfolds on a larger canvas than anything made since his arrest. Perhaps this is due to the bans on his filmmaking being lifted (and traveling, which meant he collected the Palme d’Or for the film in-person), but Panahi still stresses that his films are made in secret with limited resources, due to their explicit critiques of the authoritarian government and their historic and ongoing violence.

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It’s apt for a film made secretly that It Was Just an Accident is defined by movement and pauses, a progression of characters leaping into action and suddenly stopping, uncertain of their next one, two, or 10 moves – sometimes including the moves they’ve already made. When a family’s car breaks down, forcing a late night stop at a garage, mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) recognizes the squeak of the driver’s prosthetic leg and follows him until he has the opportunity to kidnap him. He’s convinced the man is Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the military officer who tortured him (and many others) in prison for conspiring against the regime, and he’s on the verge of killing him before doubt enters his mind – is this even the right man?

Vahid drives around the city, pointed in the right direction to other victims of Eghbal (also nicknamed as “Peg Leg” and “The Gimp”). These coconspirators have their own combination of surety and doubt about what their captive’s fate should be, and new questions quickly compound: Is it just to kill their former captor? Are they capable of killing him? Can they even trust the opportunity that’s fallen into their laps? The story unravels at a steady clip, inviting more voices and frenetic emotions with every furtive location change, the possibility of righteous violence looking more likely and less inevitable at any given moment.

Everyone apart from Eghbal is a stranger to Vahid – the photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari) becomes a voice of clarity for bride-to-be Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and her groom Ali (Majid Panahi), as well as the tempestuous, broke Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, best in show), who elects himself as a man of action despite losing control of his life after prison. All the while, Eghbal lies in a crate in Vahid’s van, carted from the desert to an underpass to a rooftop parking lot to a hospital entrance. Throughout the former prisoners’ vivid and sometimes spiteful arguments about how Eghbal should be dispatched, life in the city continues – children must be calmed, gas station attendants make crass jokes, receptionists have little patience.

An ironic motif underpinning the heavy moral burden of the ex-prisoners is a financial one – the makeshift posse are constantly pushed for cash by corrupt security guards, a cheeky gas station attendant, and a sassy midwife (who’s admittedly most deserving of a payout). Far from taking the sting out of the severe revenge plot, the constant interjections are a surreally mundane juxtaposition, a minor example of conflict resolution, and their looming extrajudicial vengeance is difficult to imagine in the same tidy, transactional terms.

It Was Just an Accident does run the risk of theatricality on the basis of how much it expresses itself in dialogue between cleanly blocked actors. Not just its moral conflicts and reflections, but the character backstories and interpersonal criticisms are all spoken, sometimes in monologues that span the majority of scenes, where one character will pick up the soliloquy baton to confess the dark truths resurrected by Eghbal’s possible re-emergence. Panahi’s approach feels consistently direct, at least after the incremental first act before Vahid first confronts his captive. But Panahi is such a fine dramatist (and satirist; it’s a very funny film too) that it’s hard to feel short changed – the dialogue exchanges are so precise, lancing not just anxieties and suffering, but gaps in logic that are picked up by equally but not always uniformly angry companions.

Never does It Was Just an Accident drag – each scene pinpoints its dramatic angles and doesn’t belabor them, and Panahi punctuates them with unexpected, tension-breaking outbursts and twists in fortune to remind us of reality outside the moral dilemma. In a sense, this is what makes It Was Just an Accident feel non-theatrical – excluding a couple visits outside the city (to the locations of an impromptu interrogation spot and an open grave), our characters always run the risk of being infringed on by ordinary people unaware of their dramatic plight. In a climactic, painfully drawn-out confrontation between a blindfolded Eghbal and his most dedicated hunters, Panahi favors a lengthy, unbroken midshot that cuts Vahid and Shiva almost completely from our view – eschewing any blocking and relying on harsh red lighting to evoke their shared isolation and dread. It’s a fitting mood to resolve a drama that uses its suspense plot and questions of retributive justice as a method of studying victims questioning what a normal life could look like going forward. Life continues outside of the extremely dramatic, and not on favorable terms.

Director: Jafar Panahi
Writer: Jafar Panahi
Stars: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Delnaz Najafi, Afssaneh Najmabadi, Georges Hashemzadeh
Release date: Oct. 15, 2025

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

It Was Just an Accident Is Jafar Panahi’s Suspenseful and Human Search for Answers