IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT - Mark Reviews Movies

It Was Just an Accident, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

The making of It Was Just an Accident must have been even more tense than the film itself. For background, its writer/director is Jafar Panahi, who has faced multiple legal challenges and prison sentences in Iran for daring to criticize the country's government in his movies. Technically, he is still under a 30-year ban from making movies in that country. In his resilience, Panahi has found some clever ways around it, by making himself the subject of a couple and sneaking them out of Iran for the rest of the world to see.

With the filmmaker's latest, there is no mistaking his intentions, purpose, and defiance. Here is a story of the oppressive nature of his country's government and how it turns ordinary people to do things they otherwise might never have even imagined doing. That its quintet of protagonists are incompetent at the task at hand might have been the foundation of a comedy of errors. It is still funny at times, in spite of how grim the subject matter is, but as this plot and these characters venture deeper and further into the moral morass of what they think they need to do, the material only becomes increasingly tragic on several levels.

The setup is perfectly common. We meet a man, played by Ebrahim Aziz, who is traveling home across a dark, desert road with his pregnant wife (played by Afssaneh Najmabadi) and their young daughter (played by Delmaz Najafi). By all appearances, this is a happy family with nothing about which to worry. Showing them talking and laughing and planning with some excitement about another child coming into the picture creates a little portrait that remains somewhere in the back of our minds the entire time. From the very start and toward a person who turns out might be the least likely candidate to deserve it, Panahi offers a sense of humanity that authoritarian regimes believe necessary to eradicate.

While driving, the man accidentally hits a stray dog. It clearly upsets him—even more so because his daughter can't comprehend why it happened, no matter how much her mother tries to console her. As a result of the damage, the car's engine starts to sputter and slow to a crawl. The man manages to drive to an auto garage down the road, and as he arranges help from a mechanic there, the film's perspective switches to Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), another mechanic, who thinks he recognizes the man's voice. He definitely remembers the constant squeaking of the man's prosthetic leg.

Vahid is certain the voice and the sound belong to the intelligence agent who tortured him after his arrest some years ago. He decides to follow the man to his home, keep tabs on him as he goes about his day, and, after considering running him down with his van on the street in broad daylight, spontaneously decides to abduct this man, drive him out to the desert, and bury him alive.

This would seem a hasty end to Panahi's tale, given that Vahid goes through the effort of digging a grave in the sand, putting his bound captive in that hole, and starting to shovel the earth on top of him. The man, however, begs and pleads for some explanation, which Vahid offers, telling the man he might as well stop playing dumb about being an intelligence agent named Eghbal, "the Peg Leg," as his prisoners would refer to him. The man denies it, and because it says everything about the kind of person Vahid—as well as everyone else who becomes part of this improvised abduction—really is, he cannot carry through with killing this man. Vahid now has doubts about his captive's identity.

That uncertainty might go deeper still, too, because morality and choosing the right way to act for regular people like Vahid and his eventual comrades on this mission are matters of asking questions—about the world, about other people, about oneself. It stands in stark contrast to those like Eghbal, whether or not the man locked up in a storage container in the back of the van is the same man, and those in this regime. They act as if the answer is right in front of them and always has been. Questions only get in the way of doing what needs to be done.

They certainly do for Vahid, who eventually finds his way to Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a professional photographer who was also tortured by Eghbal. She just happens to be taking wedding photos for Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), who was also a prisoner subjected to Eghbal's ways, and her groom-to-be Ali (Majid Panahi). The three are almost certain this man is their tormentor, but almost certain is not enough for any of them to justify exacting some kind of revenge against this man, even after Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a fourth victim of Eghbal, tells them is absolutely confident of the man's identity.

The film unfolds as a thriller, because all of this is happening out in the open (Adding to that tension is the fact that Panahi had to shoot the entire film in a similarly clandestine manner, because the process of him making art in Iran has become a criminal act), and as a grueling moral debate, often playing out in long single takes of conversations that inevitably become arguments. Even under the pressure of shooting the way he did, Panahi's approach is as precise as his framing and staging of the suspense sequences and the dialogues. They reveal everything we need to know about how these characters were wronged and are still traumatized by their experiences and what they want to do their former torturer.

The very fact that they are willing to question their motives, this plan, and the full scope of the potential consequences of achieving vengeance—especially after the group has to directly consider their captive's family—is the crux of this film. These are decent, humane people forced into an indecent, inhumane situation. They prove themselves time and again in It Was Just an Accident until the truth is revealed. The film's final moments, though, force us to reckon with the notion that, while questions of morality may help us maintain our humanity, survival is an entirely different matter.

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