Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Majid Panahi, and Hadis Pakbaten in It Was Just An Accident.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
It Was Just an Accident
Written and directed by Jafar Panahi
Starring Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari and Ebrahim Azizi
Classification N/A; 104 minutes
Opens in select theatres Oct. 24
Critic’s Pick
Every film, they say, is its own little miracle – the serendipitous result of a million different things turning out just right. But It Was Just an Accident, the latest film from Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi and winner of the Palme d’Or at this past spring’s Cannes Film Festival, is a miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.
In 2022, Panahi – Iran’s most prominent and respected filmmaker, feted around the world for his sometimes whimsical, sometimes daring work – was detained in Tehran. His crime? Visiting the country’s notorious Evin prison to inquire about the status of his friend and colleague Mohammad Rasoulof, who had been arrested for “disrupting the psychological security of society.” Panahi was swiftly put behind bars – in what his wife said amounted to a “kidnapping” – which is where he stayed for seven months. (Rasoulof was eventually released, too, going on to make the award-winning 2024 drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig.)
For many, such an unexpected imprisonment would be the most traumatic chapter of their entire lives. But for Panahi, it was just the latest in a series of injustices that have pockmarked, and defined, his whole career. The artist has worked through prison stints and house arrests, travel bans and censor boards. This Is Not a Film, from 2011, was made in his living room on an iPhone. The Turkey-set portions of 2022 meta-contextual satire No Bears were directed remotely from Panahi, living in a dusty Iranian village near the border (appropriately, he played a character named “Jafar Panahi” who struggles to make a film over wonky Wi-Fi).
Every time Tehran’s regime has threatened to stare him down into a forced retirement, Panahi has only gazed back with more intensity.
All of which makes his latest production a testament to ingenuity and courage while also being a quietly furious response to the horrible conditions under which it was spawned. Shot without state permission, but nonetheless permitted to slip out from Tehran’s control measures and into the wider world, It Was Just an Accident is a sly triumph that succeeds precisely because Panahi has been put through the wringer and come out the other end with such a singular, incendiary and essential perspective.
The film opens with a shot similar to the opening of Panahi’s 2015 film Taxi: a man behind the wheel of a car, his history and motivations as opaque as the dusty windshield through which he is filmed. Initially, it appears as if the driver, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is the hero of this particular story, even when he accidentally drives over a dog and then brushes the event off (much to the consternation of his pregnant wife in the passenger seat and their young daughter, who is clutching an iPad in the back).
Is this the tale of Eghbal the indifferent? Not so much, as Panahi quickly shifts the perspective to that of a mechanic named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who encounters Eghbal after the roadkill incident and immediately begins to panic. Is this seemingly innocuous family man, Vahid wonders, in fact the same jailer nicknamed “Peg Leg,” who tortured him and so many other innocent civilians inside the Evin prison not so long ago? He walks with the same limp, and sports the same facial features. But nothing is certain.
After abducting Eghbal and knocking him unconscious, his body stuffed in the back of a van, Vahid frantically drives around Tehran, rounding up former prisoners who had suffered under Peg Leg in the hopes of confirming the villain’s identity, and perhaps issuing some manner of retribution.
Maryam Afshari in It Was Just An Accident.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
The dark premise at first recalls Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s acclaimed 1990 production of Death and the Maiden – later adapted by Roman Polanski and starring Sigourney Weaver as a former political prisoner convinced that Ben Kingsley’s character is in fact her one-time torturer. But whereas Dorfman’s work was a confined-setting three-hander that deliberately limited its worldview, Panahi is set on reconstructing an entire world, one that cannot be contained by the chamber drama of Dorfman’s work or, say, the cells of Evin that he himself was once a reluctant guest of.
Gradually, Panahi widens Vahid’s ticking-clock quest – every minute wasted is one more during which Eghbal could awaken and wreak havoc – adding a number of Peg Leg survivors reckoning with their own traumas. Some are more fully sketched out than others, though a wedding photographer played by Mariam Afshari, who appears without the country’s mandatory hijab, is a welcome addition, quick-witted and dumbfounded at the same time.
Meantime, Panahi layers on a number of deadpan comedic set pieces that answer the never-before-asked question of, “What if Weekend at Bernie’s were a political satire?” (A recurring motif: government officials, from parking lot security guards to hospital administrators, so accustomed to accepting bribes that they walk around with portable debit-card machines.)
As Vahid and his fellow victims inch closer to the truth, though, Panahi carefully balances the bone-dry comedy with bone-chilling suspense. When the central mystery of Peg Leg is finally unlocked with a nerve-shredding monologue from a tied-up Eghbal, Panahi reaches some kind of terrible career high. This is a movie born out of a lifetime that no one should have been forced to endure. And yet, the film world is stronger for the suffering.