It Was Just an Accident (2025)

PG-13, which is really weird because it feels like it should be R.  The content in this movie is incredibly heavy, but none of it is really all that explicit.  These are victims of an oppressive government who describe the horrors, both physical and sexual, that happen to them.  But because these characters have all been through this, they often use shorthand.  There never is a scene where they are talking to an avatar of the audience.  Your brain tends to fill in the story between what is said and what is unsaid.  But there is some violence considering that this is a tale about how vengeance should or should not be executed.  

DIRECTOR:  Jafar Panahi

I wish this wasn't the last one I saw.  I've knocked out all of the Academy Award nominees that are available to me in my area.  It was an incredibly productive Oscar season and I'm happy that I watched as many as I have.  The problem is that It Was Just an Accident might have completely blown me away...if it wasn't the last full-length movie that I will be writing about for the 2026 Oscar season.

If the first Trump administration made me an amateur activist, the second has galvanized me about the importance of activism while actively criticizing myself for keyboard activism.  There are things that I do that I don't post about, but almost that is exclusively because I don't want praise.  Praise defeats the purpose.  But when I think of what Jafar Panahi has done for his beliefs, it makes me appreciate his art so much more.  If you are unaware, we are at war with Iran.  President Trump calls it an "excursion".  I think he was told to say "incursion" and he keeps messing up the word.  That's neither here nor there.  While I am vocally against the strikes in Iran because the sheer loss of life involved (and the dubious reasoning for being involved), I can't deny that the Iranian government is an oppressive government.  (You can condemn both the U.S. actions in Iran and the Iranian government at the same time.  The world isn't black-and-white.) Panahi made this movie without legal permission from the Iranian regime.  He's been in prison so many times for the art he has made criticizing the government.  He's older and has starved himself for his beliefs.  If you see this movie for no other reason than the fact that the man has risked his life to make this movie, then see it for that reason.

And the movie is pretty darned good.  It's a character-forward story about how good people --victims! --deal with their victimhood and risk selling out their souls for what toes the line between revenge and justice.  If you are one of my World Lit 2 students right now, this might be an incredible source for your final paper.  Just saying.  I just watched The Voice of Hind Rajab, also a socially conscious movie talking about oppressive governments.  Watching these two films makes us aware that, as much as we occasionally challenge our government, the situation in the Middle East are haunting reminders that art does have that level of importance.  While Hind Rajab is perhaps a bit more overt in its message, there is something incredibly universal about It Was Just an Accident.  

This isn't to say that It Was Just an Accident isn't culturally relevant.  After all, what becomes painfully clear that Iran's secret police have such zeal in the performance of their brutality that everyone Vahid met knew of Peg Leg.  Like, everywhere that dude went, people knew of the atrocities that this man had caused them.  Sure, some of might be because Vahid went searching for people who could help him make these moral choices.  But the fact that the film has a bride and groom in their full regalia getting ready to commit serious crimes is telling.  That is something that probably speaks to the Iranian people (people who probably be denied the chance to see this movie.)  I don't want to downplay a second of how culturally relevant and timely that this movie is.  This movie probably messed with a lot of people's sense of calm.

Yet, I don't want to downplay the universal either.  While the events that brought all these people is specific to the people of Iran, this is a movie that affirms what it means to be human.  The movie starts off in a dark place.  Vahid's revelation that Peg Leg is downstairs causes him to spiral into something that, we discover later, is fundamentally against his character.  Yes, the movie wants us to question whether or not the man with the prosthetic leg was this sadist who tortured all of these people.  After all, Vahid doesn't get a look at his face.  He recognizes the squeak of the leg that Vahid later tells us was left intentionally to strike fear into Peg Leg's prisoners.  (He actually says that he leaves the squeak to remind people that he lost his leg fighting for the regime in Syria, but I am adding characters' reactions to the leg to synthesize a deeper meaning.) We only discover later that Vahid had spent all of his adrenaline capturing Peg Leg and digging the hole that, when he has the comedown, his morality begins making him doubt his choices.  Maybe it is a bit of a trope to tell the story of how victims almost lose themselves in revenge plots, but there's a reason that the trope exists.  

There's a reason that this movie probably resonantes with me now than it did before.  When Henson and I argue whether art has impact on politics, I can't help but think that I may have gotten more of my morals from movies, TV, and comic books than I did from examples in my church.  I love Catholicism because, on paper, it says all of the things that pop culture does.  "Love your neighbor."  "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"  That kind of stuff.  But I don't really see a lot of people in my neck of the woods living up to those expectations, so I look to movies like this where those words have a lot more impact.  I'm not a victim like these people.  I have a fairly great life.  Yet it feel like everyday I hear something that tears my heart out and I wonder what happened to us as a species.  When I was absorbing these messages of doing the right thing, even if it hurts, as a child, it was molding me.  But now I need those moments because Vahid and Shiva don't kill Peg Leg.  (Yeah, spoiler.  Also, that dude was 100% Peg Leg.  He confesses to all of it.  It's a mislead that he has a family and seems fairly normal when he's not directly kidnapping and torturing people.) 

And Panahi gives us a clear message of what we should do when confronting a chance for revenge.  Simultaneously, he also tells us that there will be consequence for holding close to your truth.  Vahid and Shiva almost kill the guy.  It really reads like both of them are going to cross a line.  I bet the actors had to tell themselves that their characters didn't know if they would cross that line or not.  But the two of them, after getting close to killing him, set him free.  (Slowly and carefully.  They aren't dumb.  They just can't stoop to his level.)  But that last shot was the shot that I was hoping for throughout the film.  Peg Leg isn't the kind of guy who learned his lesson just because he had a come-to-Jesus moment.  It's almost a tale about the blindness of self-righteousness.  (Listen, the worst thing that I'm doing with my self-righteousness is attempting to have poor people and foreigners treated as actual human beings.  We're not the same.)  That squeak ending, knowing that Vahid will never know peace because Peg Leg is always out there, messing with him, is the more authentic ending.  

But, yeah, there were times that I got a little bored.  That makes me feel like a monster, knowing that each shot had something clandestine that went into it.  It's an incredible movie that just caught me while I was a little tired.  Does that mean I shouldn't ever criticize a movie that went through hell to make it?  Probably not.  But this is a good movie that was simply overshadowed by other great movies.