‘It Was Just an Accident’ Review: Jafar Panahi’s Incendiary Revenge Thriller

Jafar Panahi’s docu-fiction hybrid movies, from This Is Not a Movie to No Bears, had been precipitated by his varied arrests and imprisonments, permitting the Iranian auteur ample alternative to ponder the never-ending nightmare of being below menace from a regime that endeavored to cease him from making movies altogether. It Was Just an Accident might boast a extra polished and historically constructed narrative, however it’s no much less a mirrored image of Panahi’s presently fractious relationship along with his nation. It’s additionally astutely conscious of the bodily and psychological scars that that outcome from residing in a state of tyranny.

The movie begins ominously with a household driving down a darkish street, the headlights of their automotive offering the one illumination. All of a sudden, the automobile hits and kills a stray canine, which instantly distresses the younger lady (Delmaz Najafi) within the backseat. Her expectant mom (Afssaneh Najmabadi), trying to calm the kid down, explains that this unlucky incidence should all be a part of God’s plan. “God had nothing to do with it,” the lady responds, pointedly countering her mom’s naïve optimism, whereas her father, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), stays stoic behind the wheel. Certainly, this accident may have devastating ripple results, and to the purpose that the query of God’s involvement would be the least of anyone’s considerations.

After Eghbal takes his automotive to a storage for repairs, the movie switches views to the store’s proprietor, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who freezes in horror when he overhears the shopper from the again workplace. When Eghbal leaves, Vahid follows him residence, kidnaps him in broad daylight, then drives him out to the desert as a way to bury him alive. That is when Vahid reveals that Eghbal is the intelligence officer who brutally tortured him again when he was a political prisoner, a reality he was positive of when he heard the distinctive squeak of his captor’s prosthetic leg. Nonetheless, as Eghbal hysterically denies Vahid’s allegations, doubt creeps in and the store proprietor figures he ought to get a second opinion earlier than enacting his revenge.

This kicks off a madcap quest to try to verify the identification of Eghbal, who for almost all of the movie stays knocked out chilly behind Vahid’s van. To take action, Vahid finally ends up roping in various unwitting conspirators who all undergo from traumas much like his personal and might ostensibly corroborate his declare: a marriage photographer, Shiva (Mariam Afshari); the soon-to-be-married couple, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), that Shiva is within the midst of taking pictures when Vahid stumbles upon them; and an area employee, Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), whose starvation for revenge makes Vahid’s appear rational by comparability.

Because the newly shaped quintet rides round city squabbling about the way to proceed, It Was Just an Accident reveals itself as a seriocomic morality play, with the characters’ contrasting factors of view vividly illuminated by how their various temperaments ricochet off of one another with an thrilling spontaneity. For one, the cooler-headed Shiva would relatively not be concerned and transfer on along with her life, whereas the hot-tempered Hamid is continually in want of being restrained by the others, given how hell-bent he’s on killing Eghbal proper there contained in the van.

At instances, the characters spill out of the van and argue about their plan in plain view of others. In a notable scene, Panahi retains his characters in a state of queasy pressure after they be a magnet for safety guards at a parking storage. The guards ask for a bribe to look the opposite approach, and when Vahid and his conspirators say they don’t have any money, the guards shortly produce transportable card readers. This received’t be the one time the group has to begrudgingly make funds to others, and the movie goals a brutally satiric arrow on the corruption that’s rampant in Iran by making the characters’ overarching concern of being caught with a kidnapped individual an in the end baseless one in a world the place nothing issues besides for private acquire.

Even the query of Eghbal’s identification is irrelevant. Finally, Panahi is extra fascinated by exploring how life below tyranny turns everybody into the worst variations of themselves. This and different thematic substances are acquainted from a lot of Panahi’s earlier movies, and with It Was Just an Accident, he stirs them right into a extra typical narrative framework.

Which isn’t to say that Panahi’s anti-authoritarian spirit doesn’t circulation by the movie, as evidenced by his deliberate determination to not have his feminine characters put on hijabs, in defiance of Iran’s strict non secular guidelines. And It Was Just an Accident’s closing moments carry Panahi’s critique of up to date Iran into particularly grim focus, as an ostensibly completely satisfied conclusion morphs into existential dread with the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what the oppressed do to maneuver previous the trauma of what they’ve skilled, it can all the time be one triggering thought, or sound, away.