When Eghbal’s (Ebrahim Azizi) car breaks down, he is relieved to be near a garage where Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), one of the mechanics is able to get him back on the road.  Vahid, however, thinks that he knows the man, recognizing his voice as that of his tormentor while he spent time in an Iranian prison for speaking out against the regime.  He follows Eghbal and kidnaps the man, but when doubt begins to creep in, he reaches out to other former prisoners to help confirm if the man he has tied up in his van is their former torturer or an innocent man. 

Jafar Panahi writes and directs It Was Just an Accident, or more precisely translated from its Persian title, Yek tasadof-e sadeh, A Simple Accident, a 104-minute political thriller that debuted at the 2025 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and came away with the Palme d’Or.  Neon, continuing their Cannes hot streak, acquired the title and gave it a limited theatrical release in the States in late October.  Given the subject matter, It Was Just an Accident barely graced more than 100 screens despite the accolades the title received across the entire summer and fall festival circuit. 

Like most morality plays, the conceit of the film is quite simple, and the complexity comes from the infallibility of the characters.  The complexity of this film comes in the expansion of the cast as Vahid desperately seeks consensus on Eghbal’s identity.  He meets first with Salar (George Hashemzadeh), who refuses to engage with the situation but connects him to Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a wedding photographer.  Meeting her during a session, eventually her clients, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), grow agitated at the interruption and demand to know what is going on.  Shiva is at first relenting but eventually yields to Goli’s demands; both women, we learn, have also suffered humiliation and torture at the hands of Eghbal.  Still unable to arrive at a unanimous answer, the crew seeks out Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), Shiva’s former partner and a prisoner under Eghbal’s watch.  As they bicker amongst themselves, Eghbal’s cellphone begins to ring, and eventually answering it, they find that it is his daughter (Delmaz Najafi) on the other end, crying, because her mother (Afssaneh Najmabadi), who is pregnant, has fainted and is unconscious. 

The ensemble cast all do well in their roles, and on the page, none of them are too pigeonholed into particular archetypes which is refreshing to see.  Over time, their opinions on what to do undergo change, and while they may not all change their ultimate position, the intensity with which they feel is the correct choice is what grows.  As they become more and more rooted in their own opinion, they become more immovable and need to craft even more severe arguments to try and win over any holdouts.  What this results in is something almost like a farce when coupled with the action and some of the cast – specifically, Panahi and Elyasmehr – border on almost comic in their performances.  Humor is often used to lower the causticity of themes being explored so that a film is not too abrasive for an audience seeking to be entertained, but here it seems to undermine the tone as the ensemble begins to act as if they are in a live-action cartoon.  It is not enough to derail the film, but it does make the middle act sag as Panahi recalibrates the script with the addition of an emergency pregnancy that will add extra complications and melodrama to the third act. 

Something of a chamber piece given how much of the film unfolds in and around the van, It Was Just an Accident is a story that has a stronger expression of theme than it necessarily does its plot.  This can be enough to turn off an audience, but rest assured that Panahi does ultimately give us all the information we need to fully understand the moral conundrum and does not leave us with a dissatisfying, ambiguous ending.  Ambiguity is often the name of the game in these types of stories as it opens up plenty of avenues for discussion post-credits, but simply put, we would not have enough context to argue one way or another if the man in the van is Eghbal, so any debate would be futile and based on hearsay at best. 

What It Was Just an Accident does best, even more so than its moral question, is examining the complex feeling of anger.  Even more so than the plot-based predicament of Eghbal’s identity, It Was Just an Accident expertly showcases the oftentimes contradictory turmoil that accompanies anger. As these people grow more emboldened to kill whoever it is in the van, they eventually begin to struggle with the idea that doing so would make them murderers.  This is not exactly a story about the purist of justice, but rather an extrajudicial leveling of the scales which requires the cast to build a bridge of empathy with the audience so that their vigilantism can be understood and rationalized.  It results in a bombastic penultimate sequence where these scorned people begin to reckon with the fact that they are being held back by only a strained and fraying moral thread as they are blinded by rage against the man they believe to be Eghbal.  They were all victims of anger, and now, they are all acting on it. To achieve their personal justice, they will be no better than the man they are seeking to destroy.