It Was Just an Accident (2025) Review: Revenge on Trial

Is It Was Just an Accident worth watching?

Yes. It Was Just an Accident is a masterpiece of political filmmaking, a thriller that makes its argument about state cruelty through suspense, doubt and even laughter rather than speeches. Jafar Panahi takes a premise that could have been a simple revenge story and turns it into a debate the audience is forced to join. If there is a caveat, it is that the film’s comic detours and long conversations ask for patience before the full weight of its design becomes clear.

What is It Was Just an Accident about?

It Was Just an Accident begins with something small: a minor road accident involving a family car at night. The consequences reach Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner, when a stranger (Ebrahim Azizi) crosses his path and something about the man, a sound more than a face, convinces Vahid that this is the interrogator who tortured him while he was blindfolded.

Vahid cannot be certain, and that uncertainty drives the film. Rather than act alone, he seeks out others who suffered in the same prison, among them characters played by Mariam Afshari and Hadis Pakbaten, to help him decide whether they have the right man and what, if anything, to do with him.

Panahi wrote and directed the film, drawing on his own experience of imprisonment in Iran. It is a Persian-language thriller running 104 minutes, and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2025.

A thriller built on doubt

The genius of the premise is that the audience knows no more than Vahid does. Every scene becomes a small trial: the evidence is partial, the witnesses are traumatised, and memory, especially memory of pain inflicted in the dark, is not the same as proof. Panahi keeps tightening that screw. The tension does not come from chases or violence but from a question that has no comfortable answer: if the victims of a brutal system become judges, what separates them from the people they are judging?

The film’s structure is almost picaresque, following its reluctant band from one stop to the next, and Panahi uses each new voice to shift the moral balance. One character wants vengeance, another wants to forget, another wants the truth more than either. None of them is simply right, and the script refuses to make the decision for the viewer.

Panahi’s dark comedy of the absurd

What makes the film more than a grim parable is how funny it often is. The situation is ridiculous as well as terrible, and Panahi, whose earlier work under restriction turned his own circumstances into wry comedy, finds the absurdity in ordinary people trying to improvise justice with no idea how. The humour never trivialises the suffering underneath; instead it makes the characters feel human, bickering and second-guessing their way through a situation nobody could be prepared for.

The performances, largely unshowy, carry that balance well. Mobasseri gives Vahid a trembling, stubborn intensity, a man who needs this to be the right person almost more than he fears it. Azizi has the hardest job, playing someone whose guilt the film deliberately leaves in question for long stretches, and he never tips the scales.

Where the patience is tested

The film’s looseness is also its one real risk. The middle section wanders, and some exchanges circle the same moral ground more than once, so viewers expecting the propulsion of a conventional thriller may feel the pace slacken. Stay with it. Panahi is setting up a final stretch of rare power, and every detour turns out to matter.

Who should watch It Was Just an Accident?

It is for anyone who values films that think as hard as they grip: fans of international cinema, of political drama, and of thrillers that leave the audience arguing afterwards. At 104 minutes it is compact. It deals with torture, imprisonment and trauma, mostly through testimony rather than on-screen violence, but some moments are intense.

Good companions:

• The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iranian drama about how state power poisons a single household.
• The Lives of Others, another study of a repressive regime told through the moral choices of individuals.
• Parasite, a fellow Palme d’Or winner that blends dark comedy with devastating social critique.

The verdict

It Was Just an Accident is gripping, humane and furious all at once, a thriller that turns the question of revenge into a question about the kind of society its characters want to build. Its patient middle is a small price for a film this morally alive, and it stands among the finest works of Panahi’s career.

Rating: 5/5