It Was Just an Accident Review: No Exit

Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi hasn’t been reticent about putting himself in his films, even appearing in 2023’s No Bears as himself. So it’s not hard to see a connection between his own experiences, having been arrested and detained multiple times by the Iranian government, and the trauma suffered by car mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who suffered brutal tortures at the hands of the regime. One must wonder whether the panic that Vahid undergoes when one of his former torturers suddenly appears in his garage in the middle of the night. Not only that, but it seems that the man of his nightmares has been living mere miles away.

But how does the viewer of the Palme d’Or-winning It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadof-e sadeh) square Vahid’s urge to kidnap and kill this monster that he knew as Eghbal the Peg Leg with what little we really know of Rahid (Ebrahim Azizi), the loving husband and father with an artificial limb who weeps when he accidentally runs over a dog? Does he really seem like the kind of person that could commit such acts of brutality?

We cannot be sure, and neither can Vahid, or any of his friends or fellow inmates who also had their lives and bodies wrecked because of some suspicion. All the prisoners were blindfolded, and each remembers something different – a smell, a sound, the feel of sores from a wound – that Vahid hopes will be enough to identify Rahid as Eghbal. It’s like Panahi has made a feature-length elaboration on the old fable about blind men trying to describe an elephant. Only the elephant is a man tied up in a crate in the back of a battered old van.

As Vahid gathers other victims of Eghbal in his quest for truth and vengeance, there’s an undoubted absurdist element, but it’s balanced by a sense of very reasonable rage. Every single one of the people crammed into Vahid’s van, whether it’s photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari) or bride-to-be Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), or the confused groom (Majid Panahi), or Shiva’s enraged ex, Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), has the right to be furious. And not just at Eghbal, who becomes an increasingly irrelevant figure, unseen and unheard in his box. It’s righteous fury against an entire system that steals years from lives, destroys futures and bodies, and isn’t really going anywhere. The fact that Vahid is no longer in a physical prison means little more than the fact that Panahi is now allowed to travel internationally. The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public. That Shiva – who feels like a vestige of a less repressive pre-revolutionary Iran – must quickly don a scarf whenever dealing with the authorities is a subtle sign that nothing has ever changed. In that context, what can revenge against one man possibly mean?

That question is posed in the most direct fashion in the final interrogation of Rahid, bathed in the red brake lights of Virhan’s van. It’s an astonishingly uncomfortable scene to watch, engrossing and upsetting, finally revealing exactly what happened to the victims of this regime. In this scene, Panahi explores the divide between actions and motivations, keeping Virhan and his fellow victims far removed from Eghbal’s evil even as they emulate his techniques on the man who claims he is the innocent victim of misidentification. Here Azizi, having been mostly absent from the screen since Rahid’s initial abduction, is allowed to bring the suspect into focus just as Panahi finally answers his own questions about the nature of resistance to oppression. That the filmmaker does so as he still faces the threat of repression and arrest speaks to the authenticity and necessity of this film.

This article appears in October 31 • 2025.