It Was Just an Accident

After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Jafar Panahi’s Iranian tragicomic thriller opens in cinemas. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is an everyday mechanic whose traumatic past comes flashing back the moment he sets eyes on Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), a man who walks with a squeaky prosthetic leg. Suspecting him as one of the regime’s torturers, Vahid abducts Eghbal and rounds up a band of fellow survivors, all of whom were punished by the man they call “Peg Leg”.

Iran’s troublemaker Jafar Panahi does it again. Much like other filmmakers of his country, the Iranian auteur has had his fair share of custodial torture and exile. In fact, this very year, as he picked up Best Director at the Gotham Awards, his native land gifted him with a one-year jail sentence and a travel ban for creating propaganda against the regime. It’s understandable why the state is so afraid of Panahi, a maestro who can dabble in dark truths while weaving bleakly comic situations. His latest offering, It Was Just an Accident, plays out as a panicky 104-minute joyride, his talented ensemble cramped in a white minivan as they ride around the countryside to decide their punishment on this devilish bureaucrat from their past (if they have the right man that is). Peppered in between the toe-clenching bouts of anxiety are some brilliant moments of situational humor, such as a wedding photoshoot getting interrupted or a corrupt cop seeking his daily bribes with a card machine (just in case you don’t carry cash, you know).

What starts off as “just an accident” leads to a haunting finale for the ages. Panahi ranks among the great stalwarts of Iranian cinema who critique their state and society with no moral preachings but rather the mundanity of everyday situations. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, for instance, speaks volumes on local judicial functioning over a couple’s domestic drama, while Mahmoud Rassoulouf’s stressful docudrama The Seed of the Sacred Fig breaks down a family when a state judge’s personal gun goes missing. Panahi is no stranger to such narratives, starting with low-stakes scenarios that unravel into something much larger and sinister. It Was Just an Accident is arguably a peak of his form as he wastes no time setting up the titular accident. A car breaks down. The driver seeks a mechanic. It’s the kind of chance encounter that sets a domino effect for people who didn’t even know they were playing with rickety dominoes in the first place.

This seemingly mundane game of chance ultimately halts in a haunting yet cathartic third act. The film shines through and through with simple, straightforward dialogue and low-budget filmmaking guiding the way, but It Was Just an Accident evolves into a different beast in its final moments. The ending and its subsequent epilogue brim with attention-demanding stress, compelling you to chew your nails to smithereens and not blink a single blink. One can’t imagine the horrors that Panahi and numerous other survivors of oppressive regimes would have felt in the dark, with Panahi himself having been blindfolded in his past run-ins with the law. In his singular, self-assured, tragicomic fashion, he’s perhaps piecing together his fuzzy memory through everymen like Vahid, possibly channeling his anger in ways Vahid and co desire: divine painful justice on their supposed torturer. But in that process, the maestro also gifts audiences a timely treatise on trauma and memory that universally applies to any land that’s plagued with religious fanaticism and Orwellian state surveillance. It’s undoubtedly uncomfortable to be a witness to this “more than an accident,” but there’s also some catharsis to be felt as Panahi’s common protagonists strive to carve new paths for themselves, driving away from the darkness that swallowed them.