Jafar Panahi's new film, It was Just an Accident, starts with a roadside accident at night: a family on a trip back home, runs over a dog with their car. The father stops, gets out of the car, and determines the dog is dead. It was an accident. But his young daughter keeps egging on, "you killed him," even with the father protesting that the road was underlit and her very pregnant mother saying that these things happen all the time in life. With the sustained damage from the accident, soon the car breaks down. The father will need to take it to the garage. So begins the ominous foretelling of the simple, yet rivetting and deeply humanistic morality tale.
The garage owner Vahid is spooked when the father shows up to his garage to get his car fixed. Vahid is gripped in complete fear. He doesn't want to show his face or have his voice heard to this customer. Next thing Vahid does is pretty shocking: he stalks the man - follows him home, and when he gets a chance, knocks the man unconscious and kidnaps him and puts him in his van. It turns out that Vahid thinks the driver of the car is an intelligence officer, Eghbal, who tortured him in prison. It was the dragging sound of his peg leg, as he approached the garage, a giveaway. In a fit of rage, Vahid digs a hole in the desert, in an intention of burying his former torturer alive. Eghbal, tied, blindfolded and covered in dirt in the ground, vehemently pleads that Vahid is soley mistaken, that he is not the man Vahid says he is. Blind folded while being tortured in prison, Vahid now is unsure if he got the right man, and wants to confirm if this man is the right 'Peg Leg' maybe by asking fellow former political prisoners. Via a bookseller friend, Vahid seeks out a wedding photographer Shiva and her subjects - the soon-to-be-married couple, and later, Hamid, a hot headed blue-color worker who was also in prison, who says he can positively identify their Peg-Leg the torturer.
With all of them in the van, as it often does in Panahi films, It Was Just an Accident becomes a road movie of sorts. They discuss the morality of killing a man while their torturer is inside the box they are sitting on, gagged and tied, in the van. What makes them any different from the torturer who threatened and abused them, if they do the same? If they kill him, are they any better than Eghbal?
To make matters more complicated, Eghbal's daughter calls his phone, to inform that her mother fainted while pregnant. Now the crew has to take Eghbal's wife and daughter to the hospital and have the baby delivered safely.
Panahi, in this slow-burn thriller, brings up the concept of morality and justice in Iran. And he reveals how the totalitarian regime inflicted upon political dissenters from all social strata, an unspeakable collective trauma - constant threat of death with a noose around their necks for hours while standing on the platform, imminent sexual violence against young women and physical torture that crippled them. After being released from his jail sentence and years of house arrest in 2023, the prolific Iranian filmmaker doesn't shy away from being bluntly critical about the totalitarian regime of his country, while showing ordinary people's humanity not being lost. It Was Just an Accident is a riveting and beautiful film.
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