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The premise is simple enough: A man finds his family trip interrupted when his car breaks down. A mechanic thinks this stranger in town was the same person who tortured him for years in prison. He abducts the traveler, takes him to the desert, and digs a grave. Then a thought occurs to him: What if this is not my tormentor, and I am committing a moral injustice equal to the one committed against me?
Revenge has always been a great catalyst for narrative conflict, one of the rare storytelling formats that usually fly arrow-straight: Someone has been wronged, they eventually confront those that have crossed them, payback is a bitch. If you can serve this dish cold, all the better. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi — a contemporary world-cinema giant who deserves a spot on the auteur equivalent of Mt. Olympus — knows that it’s not that simple. Nothing in his work (or life) has been simple, especially since 2010. That was the year the Tehran-based director was arrested and held in one of the country’s more notorious prisons for three months, during which time he was subject to what some euphemistically refer to as “enhanced interrogations.” He’d also heard a lot of tales about the experiences of his fellow inmates that were far more intense. After being released, Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years. He found a way to make them anyway. (The story behind the premiere of This Is Not a Film in 2011 is the stuff of legend.)
It Was Just an Accident is one of Panahi’s first “official” movies since his ban was lifted several years ahead of schedule, and rather than continue with the meta-fiction phase that gave us curios like Taxi (2015) and masterpieces like No Bears (2022), he’s gone back to something closer to his social-realism roots. You couldn’t begin to call this woozy genre mash-up “traditional” in any sense of the word. It plays at times like a nail-biting thriller, an elliptical road movie, a dessert topping, a floor wax, and a sort of backstage farce revolving around a killing instead a theatrical production. The result took home the top prize at Cannes this year, and though the win was well-deserved, this fable of a vengeance deferred would be a career highlight for Panahi even if he’d waltzed home empty-handed.
There’s every reason to think that Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi), the every-dad driving through the dead of night, will be our tour guide for the next few hours. He’s making idle chit-chat with his pregnant wife and getting chastised by his young daughter for turning the radio down when they hit a bump. Rashid has hit a dog. The impact has loosened something around the engine, and now the car’s not quite running right.
“It was just an accident,” the mom tells the child, who’s greatly upset over the canine fatality. “God surely put it in our path for a reason.” She has no idea how prophetic that statement will become.
The closest garage is closed, but a passing mechanic takes pity on them and offers to take a look under the hood. His business partner, Vahid (Vahid Mobbaseri), is upstairs on the phone, talking to a relative. When Rashid wanders into the office, Vahid stops his call — there’s something about this man’s shuffle that strikes him as familiar. The next day, he takes the company van, catches Rashid alone and hits him in the head with a shovel. He knows his this man is: “Eqbal the Peg Leg,” an interrogator at Evin Prison whose reputation as a nationalist and a sadist preceded him. Thanks to a prosthetic leg, the gent’s gait was a dead giveaway.
But because Vahid was blindfolded during their long sessions together, he doesn’t know what Eqbal looks like. So he gathers together several others who were incarcerated, with the idea that they can confirm whether of not this is actually the individual who made all of their lives hell. The group includes Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer; Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), a bride-to-be; Golrokh’s groom, Ali (Majid Panahi); and Hamid (Majid Panahi), Shiva’s tempestuous ex-boyfriend. Collectively, they have to ferry around their knocked-out captive while avoid obstacles like nosy security guards. Individually, they all have their reasons for wanting closure on that horrible chapter in their lives.
Panahi then throws one more X-factor into the mix, in the form of Rashid/Eqbal’s family, and it’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage. Panahi claims that the movie is not personal (he says that most of the graphic incidents described in the film didn’t happen to him), yet no one would deny any desire he might have regarding those lost months and the violence perpetraed upon him. Yet this story isn’t about the filmmaker getting revenge, so much of an example of how Panahi “gets” revenge — in terms of understanding how it operates, how it satisfies or doesn’t, how the manner of taking an eye for an eye takes a toll on those who indulge in it. You will leave thinking about the parting shot, a standard close-up of the back of someone’s head soundtracked by an audio cue, long after it fades from the screen. It’s a work that purposefully sets out to question the need to even scores. There’s nothing accidental about it.
