It Was Just an Accident

dir: Jafar Panahi

2025

It’s not that strange that there would be people who might think that there are no accidents, no coincidences, that all is planned or fated or meant to be. We like to think that we are free agents, with free will and self-determination, even though there’s no shortage of scientists / neurologists telling us, depressingly, that consciousness may be an illusion.

I think this flick is using the title ironically (uh derr fred, someone might say, if this was forty years ago, or 28 Years Later, for that matter). Running over a stray dog may have been accidental, but everything that transpires from then on is dripping with intentionality.

This flick, as you would expect from the Iranian master of cinema, Jafar Panahi, does a sly bait and switch in its opening minutes: we observe a husband and wife driving down a road on the outskirts of what we assume is Tehran. Panahi hasn’t been able to make a movie in Iran for decades because of the stupid authoritarian regime without being jailed, so it’s probably not filmed in Iran, but what do I know?

The accidental running over of a stray dog results in the family car needing repairs, which results in the car ending up at a mechanic’s garage.

The mechanic loses his mind when he hears the customer walking about: the guy that was driving has a prosthetic leg, and the mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), fears he knows the sound of that prosthetic leg all too well. Vahid is convinced that this guy was his torturer when he was kidnapped off the street, kept without reason or legal charge, and tormented by a guy they called Eghbal, or “Peg-Leg” (Ebraham Azizi).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that ‘Peg-Leg’ is probably an ableist slur, but, contextually, I will point out that the people who use it in the film are people who were horribly tortured by the jerk who did it on behalf of one of the worst regimes in human history. I mean, in reality, the fuckers have slaughtered something close to 20,000 protesters in the last fortnight, leaving out all the other awful stuff they’ve been doing to their own people for years.

The second point I’d make is that they, his victims, don’t know his real name.

Third point is, and the flick hinges on this, Vahid and the other people who he knows who were tortured, have never seen the chap. They don’t know what he looks like.

So even though Vahid is pretty sure he’s found Eghbal, he’s not 100 per cent sure. He needs corroboration, confirmation, certainty. All he has is his memory of that hideous sound of the prosthetic leg squeaking on the floor with each step. That’s not enough.

Like we all do in life, rarely are any of us 100 per cent on anything.

After he kidnaps Eghbal, and stashes him in a section of his van, Vahid essentially drives all over Tehran trying to get other victims to confirm, with certainty, that this is the guy. He wants to kill him, but he’ll only kill him when it’s confirmed.

Through a trusted friend he’s led to Shiva (Mariam Ashfari), a wedding photographer (who used to be a photojournalist until she was tortured by Eghbal). By a coincidence the bride she’s photographing, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), is also one of the dreaded torturer’s victims. Still there is no certainty in this life or the next. The last they enlist is Shiva’s former partner, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr), who is something of a raging maniac, but he has his reasons too, like they all do.

In their own ways they are each one element, representing different senses, making up a whole. Vahid remembers the sound of him, Shiva remembers, and recoils, from his smell. Hamid was forced by the torturer to touch the scars on his other leg, which he does so again. Not a whole person, but a response; the great big communal response that will happen when the regime falls. It’s a phrase I can’t even believe I’m writing in a review, because there’s never been an Iranian flick I’ve ever seen that has actually existed in a world where Iranian directors making Iranian films with Iranian characters openly talk about what will / should happen once the regime is overthrown.

What indeed. It’s especially pertinent at the moment, like it was pertinent during the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Mahsa Amini’s name in 2022, and every time the Iranian people have tried to stand up and say this awful regime which preys upon Iranians the most must go, because these people should be able to live their lives without the spectre of torture, control, execution looming over them day and night.

The regime responds by killing tens of thousands of people and jailing / abusing / torturing many more, like it always does, because what else are shitty, insecure people going to do?

Those who Vahid has brought together, to figure out if this really is their nemesis, and if so then how to give him what he deserves is further complicated by something I never saw coming. We can understand the impulse for revenge, we can understand wanting to get back at those who treated us terribly. But can we understand, or do we care if in the pursuit of our revenge, we do worse and become worse than those who wronged us?

This is a film made by a guy who has suffered first hand at the hands of this terrible regime, who will be jailed again for what’s in this film, who still has hope, who has not lost hope, than Iran will somehow become free, and the killings / brutality will stop.

In world history, few people, especially those who’ve most enjoyed the spoils of empire, have ever been as amazed as the former masters of apartheid-era South Africa, who, upon losing control, were staggered that Nelson Mandela didn’t pursue revenge against them. Jailed for 27 years, suffering endless privations and indignities just for wanting his people to breath freely without the Afrikaner boot on their necks, they couldn’t believe he didn’t want to do the same to them.

Sure, they had their Truth and Reconciliation commission that outlined the worst of the regime’s abuses over 34 years – there had to be some kind of legal reckoning for the worst instances of state-sanctioned violence – but the intention was reconciliation, restorative justice, not retribution.

And that, staggeringly, is what Jafar Panahi is arguing for here.

This all sounds so serious, I have no doubt these themes, this kind of framing and what I’ve described makes this sound like a desperate, nasty flick, but that really doesn’t accurately reflect where the flick is coming from or how it plays out. Panahi is too adept at what he does, is too skilled as a director, and is too much of a humanist for this flick to play out that way.

He wants to emphasise the humanity of these characters, not only the so-called victims of the regime, but also of the torturer, who as we saw at the beginning has a family, and his wife is expecting a baby.

I wonder if that will play a part in the story…

The film looks like it’s barrelling, slaloming, dodgem car careening in one direction before it completely swerves in a different direction, and that’s great, that’s one of the flick’s great strengths. This is a film like no other in a country where this flick will never legally be shown, and yet it’s almost like a post-regime flick. It almost conjectures a world in which the appalling regime has already fallen, where these people have the freedom to show grace towards their tormentors, forgiveness towards those who did their worst and hid behind piety, when really, like with ICE, like with the Gestapo as with any official seeming force that abuses its power and mutilates innocent and guilty alike; it’s people trying to get away from how small and helpless they feel, hence the sadism.

Is it inappropriate to point out that it’s quite funny in places? This will never be mistaken for a comedy considering the subject matter, but there is a lightness of touch in some sections that works really well to let us breath and let us dream of an Iran free of tyranny, one that’s also free of the awful Palavi clan that want to reinstall the old ways (with the Shah’s secret police who were just as monstrous as the Revolutionary Guard / morality police / whichever shitheads are mutilating protestors in the streets as we speak) and whatever awful turds the orange emperor of the Americas would install to rule in his stead, as he threatens to bomb the regime now as if that would change anything.

They can feel it, hear it, sense that it’s coming, but they can’t reach it yet. It might feel like it’s just out of reach to this director and these characters, and I’m glad that they’re behaving in such a way as if to speed the change that needs to happen along. But I see what they’re doing, and I despair of anything changing. This regime seems like it would kill, maim or torture absolutely every single Iranian, down to the last woman and child in order to stay in power, no matter how many movies Jafar Panahi, Mohammed Rasoulof, Majid Majidi, Ali Asghari or any other Iranian director risking jail or worse makes showing how insane and inhumane living with this regime is.

Still, this is a really good film, probably one of the best of 2025 and of any year.

9 times would that I could be so forgiving in the next life out of 10

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“My friends, when they fall you will all have to explain yourselves” - It Was Just an Accident