It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner opens with something ordinary: a car hits a dog on a dark Iranian road. The daughter cries. The mother blames God and poor lighting. “It was just an accident,” she says, which might be the film’s most unintentionally loaded line. Because what follows is decidedly not accidental—it’s the collision of past trauma with present circumstance, memory with uncertainty, and the question of whether vengeance can ever really settle old scores.
Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mechanic, hears something in the creak of a prosthetic leg. That sound drags him back to his time in prison, to blindfolded interrogations and the sadistic jailer he knew as Eghbal. When a limping stranger shows up at his workshop, Vahid becomes convinced he’s found his tormentor. What he does next is impulsive and dangerous: he kidnaps the man. He calls in other former prisoners to confirm the identification. But here’s where things get complicated—the stranger denies everything. His scars are recent, he insists, not the telltale marks of an old prosthetic. Doubt creeps in, and what could have been a straightforward revenge thriller turns into something far more unsettling.
Panahi filmed this without government permission, continuing his defiant streak after repeated imprisonments. The irony isn’t lost: a director banned from making films creates one of the year’s finest, a moral labyrinth that asks what happens when the oppressed get a chance to become oppressors themselves. Can you fight monsters without learning their language? And if you do learn it, what does that make you?
Space functions oddly here. The Iranian desert stretches forever, yet the characters feel trapped—in toolboxes, vans, the cramped quarters of their own recollection. Cinematographer Amin Jafari captures this paradox beautifully, finding claustrophobia in open landscapes and unexpected breathing room in confined spaces. The ensemble cast, all non-professionals, handle tonal shifts with impressive naturalism. One moment there’s genuine laughter (a wedding unfolds, bribes are exchanged, life asserts itself), the next we’re back in the suffocating territory of trauma and doubt.
What strikes me most about It Was Just an Accident is its refusal to hand over easy answers. The humour doesn’t soften the blow; it underscores human resilience. These people have been shaped by cruelty, but they haven’t been entirely hollowed out by it. They’re contradictory, flawed, alive. A birth happens. Arguments break out. And through it all, Panahi maintains his grip on both tension and tenderness, never letting either overwhelm the other.
The film understands something about institutional violence: it doesn’t just damage you in the moment. It installs patterns of thought that persist long after you’ve walked free. Vahid and his companions carry their prison with them, and now they must decide whether to replicate the brutality they endured or find some other path forward. This question resonates well beyond Iran, speaking to anyone who’s wrestled with the temptation to meet injustice with more of the same.
The final twenty minutes shift gears entirely, descending into something close to pure dread. The closing image—I won’t spoil it—lingers because it refuses resolution. Panahi doesn’t tie things up neatly, and that’s precisely the point. Trauma doesn’t produce tidy conclusions. Justice doesn’t always look like justice when you’re standing in the middle of it. It Was Just an Accident is controlled filmmaking of the highest order, proof that Panahi remains one of contemporary cinema’s most vital voices, even when his government insists he should be silent.