IFFI 2025 | ‘It Was Just an Accident’ movie review: Jafar Panahi rage-baits his way to the year’s most exhilarating act of defiance on screen

If idiosyncratic astatine the Indian Film Festival of India (IFFI) this twelvemonth told maine that the caller Jafar Panahi is the crème de la crème of the full festival, I would person nodded, laughed, and spent the remainder of the opening nighttime chasing everyone who disagreed, conscionable to ticker much folks alteration their minds. Whether you’ve been tracking the dissident Iranian filmmaker since his earliest days oregon lone conscionable sat down for his latest, It Was Just an Accident is blunt-force cinema astatine its finest. There’s thing irresistibly endearing astir this eternal mischief-maker with a camera, moving done the satellite with a benignant of bottomless, astir childlike hunger to support making films agelong aft immoderate tenable idiosyncratic would person tapped out. And if the Cannes Palme d’Or-winner’s tally truthful acold is thing to spell by, it’s not conscionable the champion movie astatine IFFI, but the champion movie astatine every festival it’s touched this year.

In the opening scene, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is hurtling done acheronian with his large woman and daughter. A canine darts crossed the roadworthy and is struck. “It was conscionable an accident,” the woman shrugs. That slipperiness of effect becomes the film’s spine, and the seemingly banal car breakdown extracurricular a humble store flips into a motivation trap. A limp, and the squeak of Eghbal’s prosthetic soon becomes grounds for horrors from the past. Vahid (an unthinkable Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic with a tortured kidney and brutal memories of prison, thinks he’s yet recovered his tormentor. He abducts “Peg Leg” Eghbal, digs a spread successful the desert, and debates whether the slow-motion of justness oregon rage volition prevail.

Vahid doesn’t enactment a lone wolf for long. He rapidly and hesitantly fills his van with radical whose lives were wrecked successful the aforesaid situation strategy helium survived. He archetypal seeks retired an aged bookseller friend, who points him toward Shiva (a marvellous Maryam Afshari), a wedding lensman and erstwhile detainee. Shiva brings on the bride-to-be, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), and her fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi). The unit is completed by the hot-tempered Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). Each joins for a shared past of torture oregon maltreatment astatine the hands of the aforesaid one-legged interrogator, with a burning tendency for confirmation, and a varying appetite for vengeance. They thrust unneurotic — arguing, bargaining, and investigating the limits of grounds — due to the fact that each of them wants, successful their ain way, to marque the antheral wage oregon astatine slightest marque him speak. The ensemble’s spot is that they consciousness some hyper-specific (you cognize these people) and mythic (you cognize what they’ve lived through).

Tonally, the movie walks a constrictive enactment betwixt achromatic drama and motivation horror. This is simply a revenge thriller and clown-car road-movie folded into each other, but it’s ne'er frivolous. The humour is simply a sharpened edge, and the borderline is sharpened by humour. Panahi inserts absurdities that soften the dread conscionable capable to marque the unit sharper erstwhile it returns successful unexpected bursts. The details are gallows humour, and they execute a governmental relation by exposing however corrupt normality desensitises cruelty, and however the petty exchanges of bribe and favour are the grease that keeps a repressive instrumentality running. Rather than relieving the ethical pressures, the dependable travel of laughs exposes the societal mechanisms that produced the injuries connected screen.

A sniff of sweat, a speedy consciousness of the contours crossed the amputated limb — these auditory and olfactory instincts correspond fractures successful however survivors behave. Panahi’s insistent indecision makes the full matter truthful overmuch much painful. The abductors tin ne'er beryllium definite they person the close man, and neither tin we. None of them saw their torturer’s look portion blindfolded, and their grounds is wholly sensory due to the fact that the assemblage remembers. The mise-en-scène collapses idiosyncratic grievance into a civic rite due to the fact that the van is simply a courthouse, the godforsaken a tribunal, and a aboriginal maternity ward a reminder that beingness proceeds adjacent arsenic past accumulates wounds.

Panahi stages the gnawing uncertainty arsenic an ethical experimentation of sorts. Would you termination a antheral who mightiness beryllium your tormentor, knowing that an execution mightiness assistance him a benignant of sanctified identity? Compromise and cruelty beryllium broadside by broadside successful Vahid’s heart; mercy and vengeance go indistinguishable measures. That ambivalence is the film’s point, and it stings.

The dissident Iranian auteur has agelong made movies nether large duress, having been banned from filmmaking, jailed, forced to smuggle his creation retired of the country, and incorporated taxi-cams and fridge-mounted DSLRs. The genius of It Was Just an Accident is that it feels similar the culmination of each those years of resistance. His films person go clandestine operations of mischief against the Iranian regime, but present helium uses conscionable 1 car communicative to indict the full system. The information that helium changeable the movie without a licence (yet again) feeds into the rage and the clarity.

Formally, Panahi refuses the oblique detours that marked his covert works of the past decade. This is simply a straightforward fiction, changeable with an oculus for the flat, civic spaces similar garages, the backmost of a van, infirmary corridors, and a godforsaken histrion that feels staged for a Beckett play, wherever mean cruelty breeds. Cinematographer Amin Jafari often holds the framework agelong capable for infinitesimal gestures to accrue meaning, and a peculiarly jarring red-taillight motif bookends the film. Panahi trusts the actors and lets the conversations bash the dense lifting, which makes the movie feel, perversely, some claustrophobic and liberating — due to the fact that the conversations trap their speakers successful a loop of memory, and the staging permits those memories to travel loose.

Rage-baiting a authorities shouldn’t consciousness this joyous, but Panahi turns it into a subversive benignant of slapstick with the value of lived danger. There’s an undeniable thrill successful watching a filmmaker poke astatine a strategy that has tried for years to soundlessness him, past signifier that provocation into images truthful nonstop and truthful idiosyncratic that they registry arsenic a confessional prank.

It Was Just an Accident reads similar a summation of Panahi’s insurgent filmography and a progression from it. The self-reflexive meta-games person been stripped down, and precision-engineered honesty hits harder due to the fact that he’s stopped bothering to cushion the blow. Watching this aggravated walloping of a movie astatine IFFI, I had that rare, somewhat delirious feeling of, “Damn, this mightiness really beryllium the one”.

It should beryllium amerciable to marque specified phenomenal cinema.

It Was Just an Accident was screened astatine the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India successful Goa