The opening moments of Jafar Panahi’s newest thriller are brilliantly deceptive. We are introduced to Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) and his family driving home at night. Stray dogs running across the road, barely visible by his car’s headlights. His wife is deep into her pregnancy, his young daughter is in the backseat entertaining herself, dancing to the music on the radio. They are one, big happy family. But inevitably, one of those stray dogs fatally catches the front of Rashid’s vehicle. Suddenly the mood shifts. His daughter is distraught and in too much emotional pain to continue jiving to the music. For a long moment, as the family must now sit in this guilt and bring their car to a repair shop, we feel sympathy for this seemingly good guy. “It was just an accident,” his wife assures their daughter. It’s the important layer of humanity we need to cast an ounce of doubt that Rashid is who the characters who will eventually hold him captive believe him to be.

It Was Just An Accident stars Vahid Mobasseri as Vahid, a working-class mechanic and former prisoner, once subjected to obscene torture by a prison guard with a squeaky false leg, a horrifying encounter has since left him damage in his kidney. The night Rashid drops his vehicle off, Vahid instantly recognizes the sound, but he doesn’t have visual memory of his former captor due to being blindfolded for the duration of his incarceration. Still intent on enacting revenge while he still can, Vahid takes his company van, knocks Rashid unconscious, ties him up, and stows him in a crate. At first, he is certain enough of the man’s identity to bury him alive, but doubt begins to plague his mind. Still keeping him captive, Vahid begins to track down fellow former-prisoners and victims of “Eqbal the Peg Leg” (as the man was once known) to get further confirmation. This includes the hot-headed Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr), wedding photographer, Shiva (Mariam Afshari), bride and groom Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi, amusingly dressed in their wedding attire for the entire venture. 

Panahi, famously critical of the Iranian goverment to the point of multiple imprisonments (even recently for the making of his 2022 film No Bears), once again made this film entirely illegally, filming in far-off locations with a limited cast and crew. His female actors even boldly featured never wearing hijabs. His camera is often placed far away from his subjects, observing him in mostly single-take masters, with the preparation to get as much filmed in as little time as possible. It’s hard to imagine any scenes had more than a take or two before moving on to the next. While that approach, as extraordinarily impressive as it is to even attempt, could come off unprofessional and shabby on camera, his cast is absolute dynamite. Each finding the right amount of panic and distress, with sprinkles of expert comic timing as they navigate through their vengeful moral conundrum. Even the camera giving the actors space to walk around and bicker in each others’ faces gives it a comic play stage-like feel, only adding to the (incredibly bleak, but) amusing tone.

The film is exceptionally intense practically the entire runtime, but Panahi’s sense of humor feels like a breeze when deployed, whether a kind offering of pastries after successfully completing a good samaritan mission in-between their torturing or a perfect cutaway to the group needing to hand-push their vehicle to get it moving Little Miss Sunshine-style (another film where a group has to keep hush about a body being stowed in the back of their van). It would be no surprise if Panahi was a huge fan of American comedies as even the initial burial attempt scene had echoes of the burial scene in Step Brothers. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence and a dumb thought crossed by the mind of this American viewer still fresh to Panahi’s work, but still, Panahi undoubtedly wants you to laugh. It is absurd, the characters know what they are doing is absurd, but once they’ve begun, they can’t just stop. The tone on display is a razor-thin line between dark truth and amusement.

Guilt is the overall burden hovering over these characters, even the main group who were subjected to monstrous acts by their captors, and is what keeps us latched to them for their entire journey. They are ferociously motivated by their trauma, but neither seems to be able to act on it. Their humanity runs too deep, but the justice they seek runs deeper, descending them further into this prolonged dilemma. They could do the right thing or the correct thing and it’s up to them to decide which is which. This hyper-unease keeps the movie moving at a brisk pace, even despite lengthy one-shot argumentations. The final 15 minutes of the film are expertly cathartic and yet also unsettling, lingering long after the credits roll. The perfect dark and poignant crescendo that also emphasizes the damage done can never be undone.