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Vengeance Is Mine
By Chris Wisniewski

It Was Just an Accident
Dir. Jafar Panahi, Iran/France/Luxembourg, NEON

It could be tempting to reduce Jafar Panahi to a cause: His 2010 arrest by the Islamic Republic of Iran on charges of “propaganda against the government,” leading to a conviction and sentence that included a 20-year ban on making movies. A USB drive buried in a cake, smuggled to Cannes the year after his conviction, containing This Is Not a Film, Panahi’s first cinematic project made after the ban. Then the subsequent movies, from Closed Curtain to 2022’s No Bears, with a Golden Bear in between for Taxi. His arrest, again, in 2022, followed by a hunger strike early the next year that led to his release. And now, in 2025, a new film in Cannes, It Was Just an Accident, made (of course) without a permit and debuting in competition to an eight-minute standing ovation and, finally, one of world cinema’s most prestigious prizes, the Palme d’Or. What a story.

And it could be tempting to reduce the reception to It Was Just an Accident, like that of all of his post-ban output, to an act of virtue-signaling on the part of the international film community. At a moment when even the United States government has opened the door to authoritarian-style censorship, Panahi may be the cinephile’s greatest totem of freedom of expression. In awarding him the Palme, the Juliette Binoche-led jury was taking a stand for the importance of artistic expression in defiance of repression. This is true, and arguably a worthy consideration for any group of people charged with using an internationally recognized platform to champion the arts.

The movies sometimes get lost in all of this. Since the ban, Panahi has produced the most narratively experimental and challenging work of his career—perhaps of necessity, given the constraints under which he works. Movies like 3 Faces and No Bears place Panahi himself at the center of meta-cinematic journeys that comment on both the Iranian regime and Panahi’s own predicament. This isn’t entirely new. As early as 1997’s The Mirror, Panahi demonstrated an uncanny ability to shatter and reconfigure narrative sense, to make movies about movies that are also about other things, usually but not exclusively the political (depending on how that’s defined). The films that came between The Mirror and This Is Not a Film were more straightforward and overtly political but, like those before and after, demonstrated an assured technical rigor and an impulse to play with form. If Panahi’s cinema has evolved over the past 30 years, partly because of changing circumstances, one can also draw a through line. These movies have much in common—starting with the fact that they’re uniformly excellent, challenging, and engaged. Indeed, Panahi’s been so consistently good that it can be easy to take him for granted. Yet Panahi would be an empty avatar for freedom of expression if the movies didn’t pass muster.

So, the first thing that must be said about It Was Just an Accident is that it’s a worthy Palme d’Or winner indeed, just on the merits. A fleet, expertly made thriller with Hitchcockian elements and ample notes of humor and sentiment, It Was Just an Accident marks a turn back to more straightforward narrative for its maker. It begins with a dazzling long take (and there’s another toward the end, equally virtuosic but more devastating), in which a family drives at night through a sparsely lit countryside. The mother is pregnant, and the young daughter in back talks excitedly about her soon-to-arrive baby brother, while the father futzes with the radio. The sweetness of these banal opening moments are essential to the movie’s design, establishing the hopeful expectancy of a growing family. Then the father (Ebrahim Azizi) hits something—probably a dog?—and gets out of the car to survey the damage. This may or may not be the accident of the film’s title, but its effects reverberate.

Without predicting the mechanics of the plot, the accident serves as an inciting incident, which leads the film’s protagonist Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic, to stumble upon a man in real life who closely resembles the one-legged judge who persecuted him ruthlessly and viciously during a period of imprisonment. This discovery leads a vengeful Vahid, a man who lives with physical traces of the trauma he endured at thejudge’s hands, to make a rash decision. It is a human but dubious response that proves ill-considered, both practically and, perhaps, morally. We come to learn that Vahid has a core of decency that gives pause about carrying through with the actions he’s undertaken. He displaces this ethical uncertainty onto a question of verifying the judge’s identity.

From here, It Was Just an Accident takes a turn toward “dark buddy comedy,” as Vahid assembles a group of the judge’s other victims, all strangers to him, on his vigilante adventure. They recount the grotesque depravities visited upon them by this ward of the state and also debate what punishments such a man might deserve. Their horrifying stories are shared in bone-chilling detail, and their righteous furor fuels a certain level of bloodlust. But Panahi, despite the depravations he himself has suffered at the hands of the regime, complicates this ethical predicament. The road trip of revenge is interrupted when the risk of collateral damage becomes palpable. Vahid and his fellow travelers find themselves ethically compromised by this unexpected complication, which suddenly casts them as perpetrators of harm against the innocent and not simply avengers of their own victimization. It is not immediately clear to them what they should do. If injustice is a condition of your existence, how much responsibility do you as an individual bear for further injustice you choose to inflict as a result of your own suffering? Is there a calculus, or perhaps a line in the sand? Or do authoritarian regimes and the violence they inflict create conditions for a kind of moral chaos, where most anything could be justified in the fight against oppression?

This all sounds heavier than it plays. Panahi keeps things relatively light, with just enough incident to fill out a brisk hundred minutes of screen time depicting the events, mostly, of a single day. If It Was Just an Accident harkens back to Panahi’s more conventional work, it resembles the biting but richly entertaining Offside more than the harrowing Crimson Gold. It Was Just an Accident works on pure movie terms as a shaggy-dog thriller with a direct but not (overly) didactic political point.

The questions it raises are deadly serious, though. Like all of Panahi’s films, they’re rooted in a specific country and culture at a precise point in history. They reverberate beyond borders, however, to any context where violence is greeted with violence and injustice is greeted with vengeance. It Was Just an Accident offers a measure of narrative closure, as well as some ambiguity. On the moral questions, it never traffics in easy answers. This movie doesn’t tell us what someone should do in response to repression and violence. Ironically, though, it may be Panahi’s personal answer: his response to all he has persevered through has been to make excellent, gripping, powerful, and thought-provoking movies like this—filmmaking ban or no—art that speaks to his particular circumstances while also transcending them.