It Was Just an Accident
Credit: Neon
A deeply upsetting, unexpectedly comic crime drama, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident is both a cinematic achievement and an act of political defiance. Completed under immense personal risk, this enthralling film delivers politically-charged trauma via clandestine filmmaking. The result is one of the most daring and unforgettable films of the year.
Panahi—an Iranian master-filmmaker who has been repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned—refuses to stop protesting oppression. With this film, he channels his deepest indignation over spiritual hypocrisy … and pulls us into a web of unrelenting suspense.
Stop reading here if you want to go in fresh.
The film follows a group of former political prisoners who set out to take revenge on their captor—or rather, the man they believe might have been their captor. The cast is superb: all believably indecisive and disturbingly human, Vahid Mobasheri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi embody authenticity that blurs victim and perpetrator. Together with Panahi’s assured hand, their performances evoke the slow-motion moral collapse of Fargo, the social inversion of Parasite, the emotional contagion of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace—where a mob beats a scapegoat to death just because they need someone to blame. Like Tolstoy, Panahi observes humanity at its worst with a wry, unflinching curiosity. Can the cycle of violence end with forgiveness, or is it doomed to repeat?
Those seeking catharsis may not find it—except in the form of uneasy laughter. Panahi’s film concludes in poetic anti-climax, a recurring motif among artists confronting political paralysis in real time. (Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, both from NYFF 2025, come to mind). The ending refuses closure, leaving the question suspended between filmmaker and audience: what will we do next?
Reviewed at NYFF 2025.
103 min.
Where to Watch: Now in select theaters, including Film at Lincoln Center.
P.S. See the NYFF Conversation between Jafar Panahi and Martin Scorsese at the link below: