Now Screening: Jafar Panahi’s ‘It Was Just an Accident’

While I have had my share of eye problems, I have never been forced to experience the world blindfolded. Jafar Panahi has. We can deduce this from his CV. The celebrated Iranian director—one of only four filmmakers to win the top prize at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals—spent months incarcerated in Iran’s brutal Evin Prison after receiving a six-year sentence for creating “propaganda” against the state. (Today, while “free,” he lives with the knowledge that he could be forced to report to prison at any time.)

It is also apparent while watching It Was Just an Accident, Panahi’s masterwork of a revenge thriller that exactingly traces how evil, once inflicted, metastasizes within our souls and eventually overtakes us. The film, which recently played the Telluride and Toronto film festivals and opened in the U.S. on October 15, is the sixth straight Cannes Palme d’Or winner to be released domestically by Neon, with two of those movies—Parasite and Anora—also taking home the Best Picture Oscar.

You can fully discern Panahi’s blindfolded past by the way his latest film perks up your ears. Desperate dog barks, the purr of an idling van, mysterious wind chimes, the chirps of birds caged and uncaged—the din of daily life in Tehran is not just a pointillist sonic hellscape in Panahi’s hands, but a means of both orientation—and its opposite.

One particular sound, though, echoes loudest: the rhythmic squeak of a prosthetic limb that may or may not belong to Peg Leg, a notorious intelligence officer who tortured prisoners rounded up for often minor infractions. When Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri, a Panahi veteran who mesmerizes here) hears that creaky footfall enter the warehouse where he now works, he is at first flooded with terrifying memories from his own imprisonment for protesting unfair wages. Then, just as suddenly, he is struck by inspiration: why not abduct this wretched man and inflict some well-earned payback?

But once he captures him, following a beautifully constructed cat-and-mouse game that recalls the car-bound sequences in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, Vahid is confronted with a dilemma: what if he’s got the wrong guy? He was, after all, blindfolded throughout his torture. There could very well be another fellow traipsing about the countryside with a noisy prosthetic. The man may be who he claims to be: a simple family man with a pregnant wife and a boisterous pop-music-loving daughter who just happened upon some late-night car trouble.

The other side is never burdened by such doubt. They prefer—as we discover in a devastating scene that will likely be as emotionally resonant a moment as you will experience in a movie this year—to equally abuse and murder the innocent and guilty and let God sort it out. Doing the same may very well be the only way to defeat them, but in doing so, haven’t we already lost?

Panahi has crafted a moral quandary fit for Plato; yet unlike his past works—including 2022’s No Bears and 2018’s 3 Faces (both of which, like this film, were filmed without permission in Iran)—there’s nothing theoretical or metaphoric on display here. The questions the film poses, and the desperate urgency behind them, stick in your conscience like an infected thorn prick. But for all its searing timeliness, the film’s greatest shock is that it never allows its trenchant moral fury to overwhelm its entertainment value. Yes, you will laugh in this movie, even as you despair.

As Vahid assembles a motley crew of Peg Leg’s victims to help with the identification—a quiet bookstore proprietor; a hustling wedding photographer and her subjects, a still-infuriated bride-to-be and her feather-smoothing groom; a hot-headed, retribution-seeking day laborer—this edge-of-your-seat thriller twists into a caper farce, a high-stakes comedy of manners and caustic comment on daily life in a corrupt social order. (Everyone, from gas station attendants to maternity ward nurses, has a hand out for a bribe.)

Panahi manages these tone shifts with exhilarating technical assurance—a feat of moviemaking grace, particularly when you take into consideration the circumstances of the film’s production. Truffaut measured directorial mastery by what he called a filmmaker’s temperature on set; while it is something I always felt I vaguely understood, I have never seen the idea so fully expressed on screen as through Panahi’s ingenious use of color, light, framing, gesture, rhythm and, yes, sound.