It Was Just an Accident
Yek tasadof-e sadeh
Jafar Panahi (2025)
A man (Ebrahim Azizi), driving at night with his pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and their daughter (Delnaz Najafi), accidentally hits and kills a dog on the road. The collision results in minor damage to the man’s car. Next day, he takes it to a local garage for repairs. The man has a prosthetic leg. One of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognises the squeaking sound the leg makes. Its owner phones his mother while he’s at the garage. The mechanic thinks he recognises the man’s voice, too. Vahid believes this is Eghbal, nicknamed ‘Peg Leg’, who tortured Vahid and others in the Iranian jail where they were once held as political prisoners. Vahid can’t be 100% certain – the prisoners were forced to wear blindfolds – but he’s sure enough this is Eghbal to kidnap the man, also now blindfolded. Vahid drives to a desert location outside Tehran, where he prepares to bury his captive alive. The man does have a prosthetic leg but insists that, unlike Eghbal, he lost the limb only recently. He begs for mercy and Vahid decides to get a second opinion on his identity. After knocking the man out with a shovel, Vahid drags him into the back of his van, bundles his unconscious body into a large, secured box, and returns to the city.
These are the early stages of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which combines realistic physical settings and action with structured and deliberate political messaging. The different characters joining the story represent distinct points of view. Vahid calls at the Tehran bookshop run by Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), his friend and erstwhile political ally. Salar is shocked to learn what Vahid has done and unwilling to get involved, beyond pointing Vahid in the direction of a mutual acquaintance who may be able to identify Eghbal. This is Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer. When Vahid tracks her down, Shiva is taking photos of a couple who are to be married next day (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi) and already dressed for their wedding: bride-to-be Goli, like Vahid and Shiva, was among Peg Leg’s torture victims in jail but isn’t sure if he’s the man inside Vahid’s van in a prospective coffin. Shiva thinks she recognises Eghbal’s smell but is reluctant to commit herself. Having drugged the captive and plugged his ears, the group set off to find Shiva’s ex-partner, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), who also suffered at Eghbal’s hands. Hamid is certain this is Peg Leg and wants to kill him without further ado.
It Was Just an Accident is getting overwhelmingly positive critical notices (currently 98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, from 181 reviews). One reason for this, although it probably counts for less than Panahi’s extensive personal experience on the receiving end of Iran’s authoritarian theocracy (more on that below), is a highly concentrated storyline which, for many people, may increase the narrative’s intensity. I felt it made the film monotonous. The opinions of Eghbal’s captors (he eventually admits to being who they claim he is), whatever they may be, are expressed in noisy disagreements with each other. As the drama approaches its climax, Vahid and Shiva drive Eghbal to another desert location, in which stands a single tree. Small, thin and leafless, it immediately calls to mind – as Panahi intends, and as Shiva therefore says – the tree on the set of Waiting for Godot. Panahi’s characters are going through an existential crisis of sorts and impelled to ask themselves what they should do, even how life can be worth living, under a tyrannical political regime. Their plight doesn’t really chime, though, with that of Beckett’s characters – and not simply because It Was Just an Accident is nothing if not eventful. If only the film’s grim themes played out with more of Beckett’s tonal variety and gallows humour.
Reproaching Vahid for abducting Eghbal, Salar warns his friend that, ‘We aren’t killers – we’re not like him’. Eghbal’s reprieve from the desert grave is the first of several illustrations of Salar’s words. Hamid is the only character who unequivocally wants to murder Eghbal; as Vahid and Shiva try to dissuade him from turning word into instant deed, Eghbal’s phone rings. His young daughter is calling, in great distress because her mother is unconscious. Vahid et al head to the family home from where they drive the heavily pregnant woman and her little girl to a hospital. The mother gives birth to a boy. In the second desert episode, Vahid and Shiva tie Eghbal to the barren tree and use threats to make him confess; in doing so, they tell him he has a newborn son and remind him of their own ordeals in prison. When Eghbal claims he was only doing a job, Vahid shows mercy again. Before he and Shiva drive off, Vahid even gives Eghbal basic information on how to make his way to a main road, presumably to summon help.
Although it feels overdone, the humanity shown by Vahid and Shiva, towards first Eghbal’s family and eventually the ex-torturer himself, has the virtue of paving the way for the film’s closing scene, which is also its best. Vahid is loading stuff into his van for his mother and sister; as he goes into the house to fetch something more for the van, he’s stopped in his tracks by a familiar squeaking sound. As the sound gradually increases and Vahid stands frozen to the spot, Panahi holds a rearview shot of his head. The scene, unlike most of those that have gone before, is powerfully ambiguous. The possibility that this really is Eghbal approaching, to take his own revenge, makes it unnerving, gives Salar’s ‘We’re not killers – we’re not like him’ a new resonance, and reflects the impossible predicament of those who, like Vahid, can’t quite emulate their persecutors’ inhumanity. If, on the other hand, Vahid is imagining the sound of the squeaking gait, it serves as grim confirmation that he’ll never get Peg Leg out of his mind. Panahi’s choice of the back of Vahid’s head as his final image may indicate the latter, but the audience can’t be sure.
Jafar Panahi’s films have fared well at major festivals for many years – from the Venice Golden Lion for The Circle as long ago as 2000, to the Berlin Golden Bear for Taxi in 2015 – but It Was Just an Accident is taking his work to new levels of international recognition. It won the Cannes Palme d’Or in May and has already been named 2025’s best foreign language film (or equivalent) by several US bodies. It looks nailed on for a Best International Film Oscar nomination and may well end up winning (a co-production involving Iran, Luxembourg and France, it’s been submitted to the Academy as the French entry for the award). Panahi was named Best Director of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle. He’s nominated in the same category at the Golden Globes, where It Was Just an Accident also has nods for Best Drama and Best Screenplay, as well as Best Foreign Language Film. Is this new film, Panahi’s eleventh feature, in a different cinematic class from all its predecessors? I’ve seen only two of them, This Is Not a Film (2011) and Taxi, but those are enough for me to say I don’t think it is. Why, then, is this latest picture receiving such unprecedented acclaim? I think for two, connected reasons.
First, because Panahi’s liberty, as both filmmaker and private citizen, has been severely compromised for more than twenty years and still is. Earlier this month, he was convicted of ‘propaganda activities’ against Iran and sentenced to a year in prison, with longer bans on travel outside the country and on joining any political organisation. Panahi received the Iranian court’s sentence in absentia – he was in New York collecting Gotham awards at the time – but it’s clear from a recent interview he gave in Los Angeles that he’s not planning to leave his homeland permanently. He referred to a conversation he’d had in LA with an elderly Iranian exile: ‘She begged me not to go back to Iran. But I told her I can’t live outside Iran. I can’t adapt to anywhere else’. (These details are from Wikipedia.) Panahi’s extraordinary circumstances make it hard, in assessing his films’ merits, not to apply extraordinary criteria. As the Rotten Tomatoes headline for Danny Leigh’s five-star review of It Was Just an Accident in the Financial Times says, ‘As with all Panahi’s work, you applaud the simple fact of its existence’.
Yet the different scale of reaction to this film points to the second of those connected reasons. The growing politicisation of cinema reviewing continues apace – especially, and understandably, in the US. Increasingly, a film’s subject counts for more than how well or imaginatively it’s made. That seems the only conceivable explanation of critical enthusiasm for a movie as mediocre as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, to give a recent example. Unlike Sinners, It Was Just an Accident won’t also be a box-office smash but that makes it easier to admire: Panahi is politically engaged and has the scars to prove it, while being commercially unconcerned. The politicising cuts both ways, of course: Armond White’s negative review of It Was Just an Accident in National Review is repugnant evidence of that. Until recently, White’s obsession with what he sees as the evils of the American liberal establishment hasn’t blinded him to the merits of certain films made by liberals working outside the US (Mike Leigh and François Ozon, for example). His railing against Panahi suggests that an overseas director is now beyond the pale if their film is even liable to appeal to American liberals. A few paragraphs of his invective might tempt any reasonable filmgoer to turn cast-iron cheerleader for It Was Just an Accident, but if Armond White can lead us into temptation, there’s not much hope for fair-minded criticism. So …
That closing shot of the back of the protagonist’s head in Panahi’s film echoes, presumably by coincidence, the closing shot of Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s My Favourite Cake (2024) – another Iranian film and, I reckon, a better one than this.
15 December 2025