IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT**

Famed Iranian director Jafar Panahi's IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT works better as political discourse than as a film. What I mean by this is that it poses interesting questions about political trauma and culpability. But the high-concept set-up is just too outlandish and absurd, and the characters too much like ciphers, for us to be emotionally engaged by the content.

The film opens in contemporary Iran. Husband, heavily pregnant wife and child are in a car bickering, when the husband runs over something, and needs to pull into a garage. The schlubby middle-aged attendant, called Vahid, recognises the husband as a prison guard who tortured him and makes the absurd snap decision to abduct him.  The problem is that Vahid isn't actually sure that this was the guard, as he is relying on aural rather than visual memory. So he drives his captive around in a white van, drawing in a group of fellow ex-prisoners to try and identify the man and adjudicate his fate. They are more or less ordinary middle-class people, far out of their depth in this brutal situation.  

I think Panahi wants to show us how ordinary people are coerced and made complicit in autocratic regimes and lose their moral compass.  And the movie has its moments of dark comedy as well as a haunting and truly tragic ending, no matter how you interpret it. But it somehow didn't cohere for me. It was a film I more admired than enjoyed.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It played Cannes 2025 where it won the Palme D'Or, and London 2025. It was released in the USA last October and in the UK last December.