Critics reviews

Equal parts thriller and political drama, It Was Just an Accident potently documents the travails of retributive justice. Its influences may be literary, such as when the hesitation underpinning its extrajudicial process is compared to Beckett’s Godot, and the film’s characters may, to its detractors, be reduced to ideological conduits. Yet Panahi’s urgency and realism shine through his metaphysical terrain of good and evil... Sparse, naked, and blistering, It Was Just an Accident may be Panahi’s most invigorating film yet.

Even without the added context of Panahi’s lauded career, the film is effective in its startling and understated immediacy, but considering the place within Panahi from which this is coming makes it all the more a bold statement from the director.

Panahi, against all odds, has kept up a steady work-rate since his ban came into effect, but this is a full-force return to the dramatic voltage of his work a quarter-century ago... The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

Panahi again refuses to work in a dramatic register that provides simple answers to complex moral questions. He is a deliberate, refined filmmaker, but his films also hum with the emotional strength of personal demons.

The powerful performances and the intent, high-strung line deliveries within a realist, minimalist film set-up echo throughout the film. With It Was Just an Accident, Panahi doesn’t try to simplify a complex ethical conundrum, but leaves it to humans to figure it out the only way they can – collectively, united in their reclaimed strength.

Some scenes are very funny — when the would-be avengers argue about what to do, Panahi cuts, hilariously, to a pair of watching security guards. The screaming and shouting eventually detract from the drama, but the ending is note-perfect.

Panahi puts these terrifying yet touchingly humane insights into a film that is as fast-moving and unpretentious as any crime caper.

Panahi welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, his latest also serves as a superb thriller. It is a towering achievement.

[T]he film lays bare the extent to which ordinary people become slaves to the seductive idea of violence, so much so that they don’t see how much it can not only hurt other people, but themselves.

Panahi decries the way authoritarianism enables the abuse of power at all levels... rants about surveillance and blowback alludes to the paranoia ingrained in the contemporary Iranian mindset, a collective psyche which Panahi scrutinises in a gripping, shape-shifting and urgent film.

In many of Panahi’s past films, along with many Iranian artists working within the confines of a brutal regime, his cinema has been coded and metaphorical (though clearly not enough to avoid extreme censure). But this time, there’s no doubt with this explicit critique, which utilizes a familiar narrative formula but has the potency of a poison pen letter aimed to slash through the debilitating censorship demanded of auteurs expected to exist as prisms of propaganda.

“It Was Just an Accident” is a return to a more classic style of filmmaking, but continues to hold a steady mirror to the director. This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it.