‘It Was Just an Accident’ Review: Jafar Panahi’s Fiercest Political Film in Years

The most significant events in a person’s life often happen by chance. Or by a chain of them. “An accident,” as people might say here. Just an accident. Crossing paths with someone, arriving somewhere at a specific time and not another, choosing to enter—or not enter—a place where something will later occur. Hundreds of tiny details can alter, and often do alter, the course of a life. In Jafar Panahi’s new film, that accident has little to do with the plot itself, but it sets everything in motion. And the consequences are infinite—and very serious.

A family—father, mother, young daughter—is traveling by car when the father accidentally runs over a dog. The impact causes mechanical issues, forcing them to stop at a roadside repair shop. When one of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasser), hears the father’s voice and the sound of his prosthetic leg, he panics, almost losing his mind. We don’t know why at first: he hides, then impulsively decides to follow the newly repaired car back to the family’s home, spend the night outside their door, and, the next morning, ram the father with his truck and drag him inside.

The logic becomes clear soon enough. We watch Vahid digging a shallow grave in the desert and tossing the man inside—masked, but still alive. Vahid plans to bury him there, alive, with no explanation, until he’s forced to give one: he accuses the man of being the notorious “Peg Leg” (Ebrahim Azizi), someone who tortured and abused him in prison years earlier. The accused insists he’s not that man, that his prosthetic leg is recent, that Vahid has him confused with someone else. Since Vahid was blindfolded during the torture sessions, he can’t be completely sure—beyond the voice and the sound of the leg—that he’s caught the right person. And so emerges the driving theme of the film: the so-called “benefit of the doubt.”

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT follows Vahid on a road trip of vengeance and verification, searching for other former prisoners who survived torture at the hands of “Peg Leg.” His captive rides in the car bound, beaten, and drugged—unable to see or hear what’s happening—as Vahid gathers potential witnesses who might confirm whether he has the right man. It’s no easy task. Each person he picks up—the photographer Shiva (Maryam Afshari), a bride-to-be (Hadis Pakbaten) and her fiancé (Mahid Panahi, the director’s nephew), and Shiva’s ex-partner (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr)—was tortured by the same “Peg Leg.” But none of them can say with absolute certainty that this is the man who did it.

As in many of Panahi’s films—and much of Iranian cinema—this is a drama in motion, unfolding in cars, city streets, highways, and roadside stops. Conflicts arise among this group of strangers who, as it turns out, all know each other but not Vahid, who found them through a mutual contact. Some argue that they shouldn’t do to the torturer what he did to them (“We’re not like him,” they insist). Others have no such moral hesitation and want him dead. And Vahid himself shifts from a hunger for immediate revenge to something far more complicated. Even if this man is who they think he is, is this really the way to take revenge?

Having been imprisoned multiple times and in various ways, Panahi knows firsthand how violent, chaotic, and painful situations can create a desire for retribution. It’s a feeling shared by many political prisoners who might one day cross paths with their tormentors on the street. But the film’s moral dilemma works on several levels: confirming identity is one, deciding what to do if it is him is another, and then there are the crime-thriller considerations—killing him to eliminate evidence, fear of exposure or retaliation. And when they discover the alleged torturer has a family, the tension and ambiguity only deepen.

Gripping and steadily intensifying, IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT begins with flashes of dark humor and bickering among the passengers, but gradually moves into darker and more suffocating terrain. The final sequence is genuinely chilling, challenging even the shared logic that has guided the characters until then. With little left to lose—or far too much already lost—Panahi delivers perhaps the most direct critique of the Iranian government of his career, even though the film largely plays as an internal reckoning among those who suffered and continue to suffer under it.

Just as a victim of a dictatorship must emotionally confront the idea of seeing their torturer walking freely down the street, Panahi’s characters—and likely Panahi himself—wrestle with that same question, evolving their thoughts over the course of a long journey from day into night. In this case, quite literally.