"It Was Just An Accident" Explores Moral Reckoning

Director Jafar Panahi pushed boundaries with his latest film, “It Was Just an Accident,” released by Memento Distribution.

The premise of the film is deceptively simple: a roadside accident leads to an encounter that may—or may not—reunite former political prisoners with the man who tortured them. However, what unfolds is not a conventional revenge thriller but a morally complex journey where certainty remains constantly elusive. Panahi is less interested in the mechanics of vengeance than in the paralysis that precedes it: the doubt, the fear of being wrong, and the terror of becoming what one despises.

Formally, the film is astonishing in its restraint. Panahi strips the imagery down to its essentials, allowing silence, glances, and pauses to convey as much meaning as dialogue. The tension is reminiscent of Hitchcock, not because of elaborate plotting, but because information is withheld, misinterpreted, and weaponized emotionally. Each character perceives the same man differently—by sound, smell, scars, or sometimes not at all. Truth becomes subjective, unstable, and frighteningly fragile.

What gives “It Was Just an Accident” its devastating impact is its refusal to provide moral closure. There is no triumphant reckoning or cathartic act that restores balance. Instead, Panahi confronts the audience with the inherent cost of choice. Justice and revenge are portrayed not as opposites but as dangerously adjacent forces, differentiated only by the weight of responsibility.

At its core, the film is deeply humanistic. Panahi does not express his political views through slogans or speeches; instead, he embeds them in the faces worn down by fear, memory, and unresolved pain. The result is a film that is politically charged precisely because it is emotionally intimate.

In a world shaped by authoritarian cruelty, “It Was Just an Accident” insists that the most brutal struggle is not against the regime itself, but against what its violence turns us into.

Final Grade : B+

“It Was Just an Accident” is now in limited release.