M, 103 minutes
4 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
This new film from Iran, about a group of former political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe abused them during incarceration, opens at a watershed moment in the country’s modern history. It has earned its celebrated writer-director another travel ban and, it seems, another gaol term. Although the winner of the Palme d’Or last year, it won’t be seen by home audiences, unless they can grab a version on unlicensed DVD.
Such is the fate of art that critiques the theocratic regime in Iran. It Was Just an Accident was made covertly, smuggled out to complete at Cannes, and is safeguarded by multiple copies held in secret around the country.
The secrecy required for its production is written into the text. While there are tight framings inside a crowded utility van, subjective perspectives inside a car service workshop and furtive shots along a narrow, tree-lined street, this chronicle about a citizens’ arrest is compelling. It’s another superbly well-made piece from writer-director Jafar Panahi.
An illegal production such as this can be diminished by production restraints, but filmmaker Panahi has turned these into a positive, resulting in a tightly wound drama, tense and unpredictable from the earliest scenes. Audiences familiar with Panahi’s This Is Not a Film from 2011, about his life while under house arrest, will know that this is not the first time Panahi has turned constraint on its head.
It Was Just an Accident opens in a dimly lit area, as a man and his family are driving through. Unfortunately, they run over a dog. The vivacious little daughter, bouncing around to dance music and giving secrets away about the family’s austere home life, needs help with understanding the incident. Her parents set in train the idea of something unavoidable, a simple accident. Yet is there any such thing, in fact? Isn’t it the outcome of circumstance?
Running over a dog in the night sets this tightly-wound Iranian revenge thriller in train
Fatefully, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) enters a motor workshop to request repairs. Before auto mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) even claps eyes on the new customer, he believes he hears the unmistakable sound of the gaoler who used to drag his prosthetic leg through prison corridors. It’s Peg Leg, the gimp with a limp, an intelligence officer in charge who caused him to suffer lasting kidney damage.
Suddenly transformed into a man of action, Vahid follows Eghbal, knocking him down in the street with the intention of burying him alive in the desert sands outside the city. A lone tree standing nearby could mark the spot. An altercation begins between the blindfolded man disappearing under sand in his grave, and the man with the shovel. But Vahid begins wondering whether he has captured the right person and returns to the city.
He hears that Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer, may help with identifying Peg Leg. Interrupting a photo-shoot for Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), due to be married the next day, Vahid enlists her reluctant support. Shiva isn’t sure either, but the bridal couple think they recognise the man as an abuser from their own time in prison. So they join in. No one, except for volatile Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), another former prisoner, can be quite sure that the drugged, bound figure is their man. But how reliable is he?
Made illegally, Panahi’s film has made a virtue of the constraints
At one level this is a caper, about inept amateur sleuths who are trying hard to exact revenge on a pitiless, anonymous authority, while they just cannot sink to the same depths of depravity themselves.
Brilliantly, and in defiance of the backstory of the atrocious crimes of the Iranian regime against their own people, It Was Just an Accident manages to inject moments of absurdist comedy. Samuel Backett’s classic absurdist comic play Waiting for Godot gets a mention. Ever the humanist, Panahi manages to extract a laugh about endemic corruption in his beleaguered country, when security guards take a bribe as the group pretend to conduct a photo-shoot at a rooftop carpark.
The film’s robust characters remind me of the spirited, friendly people I met when visiting the country ten years ago, while the film’s casual approach to the hijab recalls the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The strong, proud people of Iran have a wonderful proponent in Jafar Panahi.
Published in the Canberra Times on 31 January 2026 and on Rotten Tomatoes
Still image (Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr and Hadis Pakbaten in It Was Just an Accident) courtesy Madman Entertainment