It Was Just an Accident

Quests for vengeance probably wouldn’t exist if they were well thought out, but the one at the center of It Was Just an Accident is especially misguided. Had he remembered the proverb attributed to Confucius — “He who seeks revenge digs two graves” — Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) might have turned the other cheek. It’s no spoiler to say that his failure to do so only compounds the tragedy he’s already living through. Jafar Panahi’s latest, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, is an incisive exploration of the self-destructive nature of revenge made even richer by the unique circumstances of one of the world’s bravest filmmakers.

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It really is a chance encounter that sets the film in motion. While driving down a poorly lit road with his wife and daughter one night, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) runs over one of the many dogs that roam the outskirts of Tehran. The stray doesn’t make it, and the car nearly doesn’t either. He stops in what turns out to be Vahid’s shop to use the phone and call for help, but it isn’t his face that Vahid recognizes: it’s the sound of his walk, a distinctive gait seared into his mind from years earlier. The next day, Vahid kidnaps the man he believes to be his jailhouse torturer from years earlier, a one-legged sadist nicknamed Peg Leg, with the intention of burying him alive in the desert.

There’s just one problem: he isn’t sure he has the right man. Vahid was blindfolded for the entirety of his sentence, meaning he never saw his captor’s face. Eghbal’s explanation for why he’s missing part of his right leg is just plausible enough to make his would-be executioner pause in shoveling dirt onto his shallow grave. And so Vahid does what any traumatized, vengeful man would do: drives around Tehran seeking out his fellow captives to ask whether they think it’s Peg Leg tied up in the back of his white panel van.

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Considering the source, this premise is especially impactful. Few filmmakers have suffered as much for not just their art but art in general as Panahi. A luminary of Iranian cinema, he was convicted of “propaganda against the regime” in 2010 and sentenced to six years in prison as well as a 20-year ban from leaving the country or making movies. The cleverly titled This Is Not a Film, which he made covertly while under house arrest, was smuggled to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival inside a flash drive and rightly hailed as a masterpiece of defiance and perseverance. He’s since made four other movies — Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces, and No Bears — all of which have had docufiction aspects until now.

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It Was Just an Accident is still rooted in his own experiences as a political prisoner, of course. “I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country, and I like to work in my own country,” Panahi said while on trial in 2022 for visiting a prosecutor’s office to ask about two fellow filmmakers who’d been detained. “I love my country, I have paid a price for this love, and I am willing to pay again if necessary.” He did pay again, and was imprisoned for the second time; it wasn’t until he began a hunger strike in February 2023 that he was released. It Was Just an Accident is the first movie he’s made since then, as well as his most conventional project since his first arrest.

Few filmmakers have suffered as much for their art as Panahi.

It’s also the funniest. The more fraught Vahid’s ill-advised journey becomes, the more humor Panahi finds in it; it’s as though the only worthwhile response to absurdity is laughter. Three of the people Vahid brings with him are a wedding photographer (Maryam Afshari) and the betrothed couple whose pictures she’s taking (Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten); watching the bride-to-be’s dress get progressively dirtier throughout the daylong ordeal is both darkly funny and a subtle sign of the deleterious effect such endeavors have on the soul. No one’s sure if it’s really Peg Leg or not, and for the most part we can’t tell whether any of them actually want it to be. If it is, they’re afraid of what they might do to him; if it isn’t, any chance of closure — or, more to the point, vengeance — disappears.

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That’s quite a conundrum, and Panahi ensures that we’re as conflicted about it as his scarred characters are. It Was just an Accident has the pace of a thriller and the mind of a philosophical treatise, with all the excitement and food for thought that description implies. Not a lot of filmmakers could pull that off, but Panahi does so with apparent ease.

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The fact that it isn’t obvious what Panahi thinks Vahid and his cohort should do is a testament to his nuanced abilities as a filmmaker, and the fact that this isn’t merely a baleful ode to the healing power of revenge speaks to his qualities as a human being. It Was Just an Accident, with its corrupt officials and distraught survivors of political violence, is both distinctly Iranian and increasingly universal. No shortage of anger went into its making, but there’s even more curiosity about human nature and empathy for everyone living under oppression. Like Vahid, Panahi learned the hard way that the systems that make villains of some make victims of everyone.