The scars of authoritarianism run deep, rarely heal, and are shared by many. In It Was Just an Accident, they’re ripped open by an unexpected encounter that has grave consequences for a disparate collection of men and women.
Directed by acclaimed Iranian auteur Janar Panahi (This is Not a Film, No Bears), and winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this intensely taut tale, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, is both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama, rife with tensions between justice and vengeance, healing and suffering, and reality and fantasy.
Diving headfirst into a thicket of thorny, timely issues, it will undoubtedly provoke heated conversations in the aftermath of its unforgettable final scene.
Since 2010, when he was arrested and sentenced to six years behind bars and forbidden from making films for two decades, Panahi has worked as an underground cinematic dissident, and his persecution continued in 2022, when he was thrown in prison and only released following a hunger strike.
It Was Just an Accident was born from these experiences, and shot in secret—an understandable decision given his decades-long harassment and the fact that his latest is about the lingering trauma wrought by the Iranian regime on its citizens. Not that such a focus is immediately clear, as it opens with a seemingly innocuous nocturnal drive on an unlit rural road by Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), during which his young daughter cries for the radio to be turned up and his wife cajoles her spouse into complying until, with jarring suddenness, they hit a dog and damage their vehicle.
Eghbal gets to a local garage, where Omid agrees to help. However, the business’ other employee, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), has no sooner heard Eghbal downstairs than he’s gripped by horrified astonishment. Once Eghbal departs, Vahid follows him to town, and the next morning, a look of mounting mania on his face, he takes crazed action, pulling up beside Eghbal and bludgeoning him repeatedly on the side of the road.
It Was Just an Accident cuts sharply from that sight to a panorama of the desert where Vahid is digging a grave beside a lone, leafless tree. Bound and blindfolded, Eghbal is tossed into this potential final resting place, begging for his life. At first, Vahid pays these please no mind, convinced that Eghbal, who has a prosthetic right leg, is the state intelligence officer known as “Peg Leg” who imprisoned and tortured him years earlier.
Vahid is hungry for revenge and yet just as he’s about to get what he wants, he falters, unsure if his hostage is really Peg Leg, a fiend whose face he never saw during confinement (thanks to being perpetually blindfolded). To confirm his suspicion, he packs the man into a wooden crate in the back of his van and visits a fellow survivor, who cautions him against this course of action to no avail, and ultimately gives him the phone number of Shiva (Mariam Afshari), another woman who was brutalized by Peg Leg.
Shiva is a photographer who’s snapping wedding photographs for Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), and she too initially wants nothing to do with this madness. Nonetheless, her own long-buried hatred of this monster (whom she knew as the Gimp) motivates her to take a look. She then explains what’s going on to Goli, who faints at the mention of Peg Leg, thereby revealing that she was also one of his victims.
Incapable of verifying their captive’s identity, Vahid and the rest of these individuals pick up Shiva’s friend Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), who reacts with violence from the outset and voices no doubts about the man being Peg Leg or how they should dispose of him.
It Was Just an Accident mires itself in these strangers’ ethical dilemma, caught between their burning desire for payback, their uncertainty about their would-be victim, and their fear of succumbing to their worst instincts and, in the process, becoming the thing they most loathe.
Panahi’s camera patiently gazes at, and subtly moves about, his characters in long, unbroken takes that highlight their anger, confusion, and misgivings, and his cast’s superb performances capture the range of wild, conflicting emotions—and attendant opinions and choices—begat by this perilous situation.
It Was Just an Accident revolves around the question of whether Eghbal is the infamous Peg Leg, but it’s most concerned with the torment of Vahid and company, whose divergent feelings and impulses are treated as equally understandable and justifiable.
Panahi refuses to judge his protagonists, comprehending both their appetite for reprisal and their yearning for peace and compassion, the latter of which is increasingly demonstrated by Vahid, culminating with a surprising trip to the hospital.
That detour is the sole instance in which the film strains credibility. Nonetheless, any minor plausibility issues are quickly wiped out by a blistering finale in which Vahid and Shiva, desperate for a satisfying resolution, attempt one last, fierce confrontation.
Panahi builds suspense gradually, his scenario growing more hectic and nerve-wracking with each stop along its zigzagging journey.
It was Just an Accident’s charged atmosphere is alleviated by brief flashes of humor, some of which—namely, repeated requests that Vahid and others pay exorbitant tips—speak pointedly to contemporary Iran’s culture of not simply cruelty but also coercive grift. Those jabs meld seamlessly with the writer/director’s larger condemnation of a country where pain, ubiquitous and eternal, unites the past and the present.
As made clear by Panahi’s story, the regime punishes and controls its people in the moment and, in doing so, frightens them into docile submission in perpetuity.
It’s that cycle which Vahid, Shiva, Goli, Ali, and Hamid seek to break, although the best means of doing so (viciousness? Forgiveness? Retreat into the safety of avoidance and denial?) remains, until the closing scene, open for debate.
With haunting terror, Panahi suggests that there are no good answers to the questions he raises—and that indecision (much less mercy) is a commodity that those living under tyranny cannot afford.
