It Was Just An Accident Movie Review (SFF) –
There’s a certain depressing irony to Iranian director Jafar Panahi releasing a film titled It Was Just an Accident only weeks before Israel and Iran began exchanging airstrikes upon each other, affecting both military and civilian targets, with both sides sweeping the civilian deaths aside as indelicate ‘accidents’. But it also deeply resonates with the subject of Panahi’s work that civilians find themselves frequently embroiled in the crosshairs of oppressive governments and abusive leaders.
Panahi has a masterful ability to almost cheekily wink through his camera despite a career marked by state surveillance, house arrest, and a paradoxical freedom found only in cinematic resistance. But make no mistake: this is no accident. Panahi’s latest is a meticulously layered, razor-sharp meditation on moral culpability, guilt, and the blurry line between confession and complicity. It’s one of his most daring works yet—and arguably, his most personal since This Is Not a Film.
” Panahi has a masterful ability to almost cheekily wink through his camera“
It begins at night. Eghbāl (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving home with his pregnant wife and young daughter when they accidentally hit and kill a dog in the middle of the road. His wife remarks “It’s not his fault. He didn’t do it on purpose.” And from this point on Eghbāl is seemingly ‘off-the-hook’ and not culpable for his harmful, albeit unintended actions. But with the car’s engine damaged, the family is forced to pull into a roadside mechanic’s garage for assistance.
At the garage, the mechanic—Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner—recognizes the creak of Eghbāl’s prosthetic (nicknamed “peg leg”) as the same distinctive sound worn by his prison persecutor. Believing he’s found the man responsible for his suffering, Vahid abducts Eghbāl and thrusts him into a harrowing road-trip and psychological confrontation. However, when they reach a remote site where Vahid plans to bury Eghbāl alive, doubts begin to surface stemming from uncertainties about Eghbāl’s true identity
As a result, Vahid recruits other ex-prisoners including a bookseller, a wedding photographer, a furious worker, and betrothed couple, to help determine whether their current captive is their former captor – or if Vahid has made an accidental, but grave mistake. Each passenger harbors deep scars from past abuses under the same regime and as they debate whether Eghbāl truly is the torturer, they wrangle with their own quest for retribution. As a creative artist and filmmaker who has experienced firsthand the persecution of the regime, the anger in his characters is palpable.
The film merges raw emotion and an undercurrent of bitter dark humour. Panahi shoots with the intimacy of a documentarian and the unease of a thriller director with his camera holding on their faces during moments of doubt and accusation, blending suspense with moral ambiguity. The dialogue, especially about justice, blind identification, and the necessity of reckoning unfurls as the group begins to question the righteousness of their revenge. Is justice being served, or are they simply replicating cycles of violence inflicted by an oppressive state?
Panahi avoids simple moral resolutions. Instead, he offers a poetic, ambiguous finale: mercy is offered, but will mercy be reciprocated? The answer is never confirmed.
If that sounds heavy—it is. But It Was Just an Accident is never alienating. Like the best of Panahi’s work, it’s deeply human. These are films that don’t shout; they linger. And linger this one does. Days after seeing it, I’m still turning over its final moments in my mind—a wordless faceless close haunted only by a squeaking sound, a kind of unspoken absolution, or maybe a quiet resignation. The ambiguity is the point.
On a technical level, the film is nothing but masterful. Shot clandestinely on handheld digital cameras (as per usual for Panahi in his post-ban era), the cinematography by his frequent collaborator Amin Jafari balances visceral grit with striking composition. Interiors feel claustrophobic, but exteriors, especially the wide shots of empty rooftop lots and alleyways and deserts suggest a larger, invisible pressure closing in.
In a cinematic landscape increasingly driven by spectacle and algorithm, Jafar Panahi’s latest guerilla filmed thriller is a definitive example of explosive artistic expression under intense suppression. It Was Just an Accident is not just one of the best films of 2025—it’s a moral rebuke needing to be heard.
It Was Just An Accident played at the Sydney Film Festival, and will release in Australian cinemas soon.
