Editor’s Notice: This overview was initially printed in the course of the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. Neon opens “It Was Simply an Accident” in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 15, with extra dates to comply with.
The primary time that dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was imprisoned for his supposed crimes towards the regime, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement, blindfolded each time he was taken out to be interrogated. Disadvantaged of the usage of his eyes, Panahi centered all of his consideration on his ears — he would obsessively hear for auditory clues round him, and fantasize about his captor’s identification primarily based on the sound of his voice.
When Panahi was imprisoned once more 12 years later, he was positioned within the normal inhabitants with 300 different prisoners, most of whom had opposed the federal government in a technique or one other, however few of whom agreed on one of the best tactic of doing so. The filmmaker was unnerved — and compelled — by the inevitability of these disagreements changing into even sharper between these individuals after they had been launched; some traumatized former detainees would merely attempt to get on with their lives, whereas others can be consumed with a rage that bent them towards revenge.
In his first undertaking because the regime ostensibly lifted their restrictions on his artwork, Panahi attracts from these very totally different jail experiences for a uncooked and blistering ethical thriller a couple of hard-working Azeri man whose most tormented recollections come dashing to the floor when he hears somebody stroll into his place of job with the identical haunting squeak of his former torturer’s prosthetic proper leg. Performed by Vahid Mobasser, a TV station programmer and part-time cab driver, Vahid impulsively abducts the person (Ebrahim Azizi, the one skilled actor on this extraordinary solid), drags him into the center of the desert, and digs a gap large enough to bury his ache alive.
However — as he begins to suffocate the hostage underneath a small mountain of dry earth — Vahid is confronted with a stab of doubt. The person, whom we all know to be the daddy of an lovable daughter and the husband of a really pregnant spouse, insists that he doesn’t have any thought what Vahid is speaking about; that he by no means labored in a jail, and solely misplaced his leg in an accident the earlier yr.
Certainly, the scars within the flesh above his lacking limb appear as in the event that they’re nonetheless within the technique of therapeutic. And so, nonetheless cathartic it may be to easily commit homicide and name it vengeance, Vahid feels as if he has no alternative however to stuff the person right into a picket crate, load him into his minivan, and drive round Tehran searching for different ex-prisoners who may be capable to assist confirm the captive’s identification.
So begins a gripping and tightly scripted misadventure that unfolds like one thing of a cross between Park Chan-wook’s “Girl Vengeance” and Panahi’s personal “Taxi” (with a little bit “Ready for Godot” thrown in for good measure), as Vahid’s one-man reality and reconciliation fee grows to incorporate a handful of different individuals whose pores and skin carries the scars of “Peg Leg’s” violence. Wedding ceremony photographer Shiva (Maryam Afshari, a karate referee in actual life) is simply beginning to get her post-imprisonment profession off the bottom, however Vahid occurs to search out her whereas she’s in the midst of capturing bride-to-be Golrokh (stage actress Hadis Pakbaten) who she met whereas in jail, and feels her personal burning want for justice — even on the day earlier than her nuptials. “It Was Simply an Accident” can be the primary Panahi function to point out feminine characters not carrying the obligatory hijab — Shiva amongst them — right here to replicate the fast adjustments of Iranian society post-Girl, Life, Freedom motion, the place girls rebelled towards the morality police overseeing their oppression.
Ensconced in her wedding ceremony costume, and already in a really emotional frame of mind, Golrokh calls for to affix the fact-finding mission, forcing her hapless groom to come back alongside for the journey (he’s performed by Panahi’s nephew Majid). The more and more absurd crew is quickly accomplished by the addition of Hamid (carpenter Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a splenetic livewire whose fury makes it tough to belief his conviction that Vahid’s prisoner is identical man who terrorized these individuals once they had been prisoners themselves.
From the plot description alone, it’s apparent that “It Was Simply an Accident” finds Panahi working in a really totally different register than he needed to whereas “banned” from making movies — a interval that noticed his long-standing penchant for metafiction turn out to be significantly extra pronounced, as he was compelled to make himself the topic of iPhone/camcorder masterpieces like “This Is Not a Movie.” This one nonetheless needed to be shot in secret as a way to skirt authorities approval, however it takes nice pleasure in changing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s unlawful work with a barely extra formal sense of composition, even when it stays not possible to separate the ultimate product from the private expertise that knowledgeable it.
The distinction is each quick and in addition not. On the one hand, the opening scene begins in a automotive, essentially the most acquainted of places in a filmography that has all the time shared Abbas Kiarostami’s fascination with vehicles as locations which can be each private and non-private . The bruised, crisp, and vaguely Lynchian texture of the photographs, nonetheless, is worlds faraway from Panahi’s standard aesthetic.
It’s late at evening, and the person whom Vahid will quickly take hostage is driving residence together with his spouse and daughter when he runs over a canine within the street. It was, after all, simply an accident, however the little lady within the backseat is livid along with her dad all the identical. “God merely put it in our path for a motive,” he rationalizes, earlier than inspecting the animal’s carcass in a primordial flood of fluorescent crimson brake lights (a picture that Panahi will recreate later to breathless impact). “God had nothing to do with it,” the kid replies.
God’s position within the sequence of occasions that follows is equally arduous to divine, as it’s only due to this fateful accident that the person pulls his automotive into Vahid’s warehouse. However regardless of its eventual willingness to resolve sure ambiguities, “It Was Simply an Accident” derives a lot of its throat-clenching energy from the uncertainties on the coronary heart of its premise. And never simply the uncertainties, but in addition the overlapping truths — from the irreconcilable queasiness of current in a rustic the place the traumatized victims of the regime are compelled to dwell as neighbors alongside the individuals who proceed to allow it, with neither faction snug figuring out themselves as such.
A lot of this movie’s urgency stems from Vahid’s panicked enthusiasm at connecting with different individuals who share, and might validate, the ache of his expertise (he’s a stranger to the opposite characters, his assembly with Shiva facilitated by a mutual acquaintance from jail). However the ache of his expertise — most acutely felt in Vahid’s kidney — can be enflamed into a brand new anguish by the group’s differing responses to the scenario at hand. Some demand blood for blood whereas parroting the regime’s logic that executing an harmless man will assure him a spot in heaven. Others insist there’s no level, as any man responsible sufficient to be killed has already dug his personal grave.
Whereas the hostage spends a lot of the film off-camera, his abductors are crammed into frames that comprise all of their views with out privileging any of them. Tired of arguing that one response to a theocratic regime is superior to a different (even when the filmmaker’s pure empathy insists on the sort of lenience that Hamid doesn’t wish to hear), Panahi is as an alternative compelled by how tempting it may be for the oppressed to undertake the identical strategies they suffered by the hands of their oppressor, and by the ethical quagmire that outcomes from diving into these waters. As one character sighs, “The deeper you go, the additional you sink.” Or, as one other character extra bluntly presents: “What a heap of shit.”
But it surely’s the heap of shit that Vahid invitations the remainder of the movie’s ensemble to assist him shovel, and “It Was Simply an Accident” solely grows extra queasily arresting because the gang is compelled to confront the ethical ambivalence that burying their hostage on the backside of it’d require. As a part of that course of, the ex-prisoners are finally invited to carry out a sure kindness for a similar man they want to condemn; the narrative comfort may pressure credibility, however that’s a small worth to pay for the unanswerable questions that it layers into Panahi’s movie, successfully deepening a self-conflicted parable into one thing richer and fewer resolved.
Venom and mercy dwell aspect by aspect in Vahid’s coronary heart in a lot the identical approach as he and his buddies are made to dwell among the many males who so brutally dehumanized them as enemies of the state. Panahi’s tense and woundingly distressed new movie attracts a lot of its climactic energy from the sense that hell will all the time comply with Vahid like a whistle ringing in his ears, it doesn’t matter what turns into of the person he’s kidnapped. And much more of it from the implication that heaven should subsequently be hiding someplace shut by.
Grade: B+
“It Was Simply an Accident” premiered in Competitors on the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. Neon opens the movie in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 15, with extra dates to comply with.
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