It Was Just an Accident is the rare political thriller that feels both ruthlessly focused and quietly devastating, the kind of film only Jafar Panahi could make. Working inside a premise that plays like a classic suspense setup while functioning as a clear rebuke of state brutality, Panahi turns a slender 104 minutes into a study of moral vertigo. His own history shadows the movie at every turn. The director of This Is Not a Film and Taxi was imprisoned, banned from filmmaking, and censored by the Iranian regime, and that lived experience sharpens every cut, every silence, every hesitation.
Set almost entirely in auto shops, vans, or vast uninhabited landscapes, the story follows Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner who thinks he has found one of his torturers. He never saw the man’s face while blindfolded in detention, but he recognizes a specific detail: the squeak of a prosthetic leg. Convinced the customer in his shop is Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), Vahid follows him home, abducts him, and drives him into the countryside with a shovel in the trunk and vengeance in his head. What begins as a simple, brutal plan mutates into an agonizing inquiry. Is this really the man who hurt him. If it is, what would justice look like. If it is not, what will Vahid become.
Panahi refuses shortcuts. Instead of twisty theatrics, he builds tension out of hesitations and second thoughts, looping Vahid through visits with other survivors to test their memories and his certainty. One of them is Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a wedding photographer who was also detained and abused. Her late-film monologue, delivered to a blindfolded Eghbal, crystallizes the movie’s central idea with a quiet fury that never tips into speechifying. You can feel Panahi pouring his life into her words.
The filmmaking is as patient as it is precise. Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari favor locked frames, long holds, and careful blocking that let bodies and sound carry meaning. The recurring squeak of the leg becomes a kind of sonic ghost, a whistle that trails Vahid wherever he goes. When the plot edges toward violence, Panahi stages it with clarity and restraint, which only heightens the dread. The final one-two punch is as tense and distressing as anything this year, a reminder that even decisive acts cannot cauterize trauma. The past follows you home.
Mobasseri is terrific as a man whose certainty curdles into doubt. Afshari gives the film its conscience without turning Shiva into a symbol. Azizi threads a maddening line between innocence and doubt, which is exactly the point, even if he spends the majority of the film subdued and blindfolded. The performances never drift into overt gestures, and that restraint lets the ethical stakes loom larger. Panahi keeps politics in the text rather than around it. The state’s violence is not an allegory but a lived condition, and the film’s refusal to grant catharsis is its most defiant choice.
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It Was Just an Accident premiered at Cannes and won the Palme d’Or, placing Panahi alongside recent laureates whose films crossed over to wider awards attention, from Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite to Sean Baker’s Anora, with Anatomy of a Fall and Triangle of Sadness also turning festival triumphs into global conversations. Whether or not this film repeats that path, it deserves the same staying power. It is a taut genre piece, an act of witness, and a personal reckoning, all at once.
Score: 8/10
It Was Just an Accident (2025)
- Cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi
- Director: Jafar Panahi
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 104 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: October 15, 2025
- Movies Like It Was Just an Accident: One Battle After Another, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Small Things Like These