IFFI 2025 | ‘It Was Just an Accident’ movie review: Jafar Panahi rage-baits his way to the year’s most exhilarating act of defiance on screen

If someone at the Indian Film Festival of India (IFFI) this year told me that the new Jafar Panahi is the crème de la crème of the entire festival, I would have nodded, laughed, and spent the rest of the opening night chasing everyone who disagreed, just to watch more folks change their minds. Whether you’ve been tracking the dissident Iranian filmmaker since his earliest days or only just sat down for his latest, It Was Just an Accident is blunt-force cinema at its finest. There’s something irresistibly endearing about this eternal mischief-maker with a camera, moving through the world with a kind of bottomless, almost childlike hunger to keep making films long after any reasonable person would have tapped out. And if the Cannes Palme d’Or-winner’s run so far is anything to go by, it’s not just the best film at IFFI, but the best film at every festival it’s touched this year.

In the opening scene, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is hurtling through darkness with his pregnant wife and daughter. A dog darts across the road and is struck. “It was just an accident,” the wife shrugs. That slipperiness of consequence becomes the film’s spine, and the seemingly banal car breakdown outside a modest garage flips into a moral trap. A limp, and the squeak of Eghbal’s prosthetic soon becomes evidence for horrors from the past. Vahid (an incredible Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic with a tortured kidney and brutal memories of prison, thinks he’s finally found his tormentor. He abducts “Peg Leg” Eghbal, digs a hole in the desert, and debates whether the slow-motion of justice or rage will prevail.

Vahid doesn’t stay a lone wolf for long. He quickly and hesitantly fills his van with people whose lives were wrecked in the same prison system he survived. He first seeks out an old bookseller friend, who points him toward Shiva (a marvellous Maryam Afshari), a wedding photographer and former detainee. Shiva brings along the bride-to-be, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), and her fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi). The crew is completed by the hot-tempered Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). Each joins for a shared history of torture or abuse at the hands of the same one-legged interrogator, with a burning desire for confirmation, and a varying appetite for vengeance. They ride together — arguing, bargaining, and testing the limits of evidence — because each of them wants, in their own way, to make the man pay or at least make him speak. The ensemble’s strength is that they feel both hyper-specific (you know these people) and mythic (you know what they’ve lived through).

A still from ‘It Was Just an Accident’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

Tonally, the film walks a narrow line between black comedy and moral horror. This is a revenge thriller and clown-car road-movie folded into each other, but it’s never frivolous. The humour is a sharpened edge, and the edge is sharpened by humour. Panahi inserts absurdities that soften the dread just enough to make the violence sharper when it returns in unexpected bursts. The details are gallows humour, and they perform a political function by exposing how corrupt normality desensitises cruelty, and how the petty exchanges of bribe and favour are the grease that keeps a repressive machine running. Rather than relieving the ethical pressures, the steady flow of laughs exposes the social mechanisms that produced the injuries on screen.

A sniff of sweat, a quick feel of the contours across the amputated leg — these auditory and olfactory instincts represent fractures in how survivors behave. Panahi’s insistent indecision makes the whole affair so much more painful. The abductors can never be sure they have the right man, and neither can we. None of them saw their torturer’s face while blindfolded, and their evidence is entirely sensory because the body remembers. The mise-en-scène collapses personal grievance into a civic rite because the van is a courthouse, the desert a tribunal, and a later maternity ward a reminder that life proceeds even as history accumulates wounds.

Panahi stages the gnawing uncertainty as an ethical experiment of sorts. Would you kill a man who might be your tormentor, knowing that an execution might grant him a kind of sanctified identity? Compromise and cruelty sit side by side in Vahid’s heart; mercy and vengeance become indistinguishable measures. That ambivalence is the film’s point, and it stings.

The dissident Iranian auteur has long made movies under great duress, having been banned from filmmaking, jailed, forced to smuggle his art out of the country, and incorporate taxi-cams and fridge-mounted DSLRs. The genius of It Was Just an Accident is that it feels like the culmination of all those years of resistance. His films have become clandestine operations of mischief against the Iranian regime, but here he uses just one car story to indict the whole system. The fact that he shot the film without a permit (yet again) feeds into the rage and the clarity.

A still from ‘It Was Just an Accident’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

Formally, Panahi refuses the oblique detours that marked his covert works of the last decade. This is a straightforward fiction, shot with an eye for the flat, civic spaces like garages, the back of a van, hospital corridors, and a desert tree that feels staged for a Beckett play, where ordinary cruelty breeds. Cinematographer Amin Jafari often holds the frame long enough for minute gestures to accrue meaning, and a particularly jarring red-taillight motif bookends the film. Panahi trusts the actors and lets the conversations do the heavy lifting, which makes the film feel, perversely, both claustrophobic and liberating — because the conversations trap their speakers in a loop of memory, and the staging permits those memories to come loose.

Rage-baiting a regime shouldn’t feel this joyous, but Panahi turns it into a subversive kind of slapstick with the weight of lived danger. There’s an undeniable thrill in watching a filmmaker poke at a system that has tried for years to silence him, then shape that provocation into images so exact and so personal that they register as a confessional prank.

It Was Just an Accident reads like a summation of Panahi’s insurgent filmography and a progression from it. The self-reflexive meta-games have been stripped down, and precision-engineered honesty hits harder because he’s stopped bothering to cushion the blow. Watching this intense walloping of a film at IFFI, I had that rare, slightly delirious feeling of, “Damn, this might actually be the one”.

It should be illegal to make such phenomenal cinema.

It Was Just an Accident was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa

Published – November 24, 2025 05:13 pm IST