Critics reviews

Exemplary of Losey and Pinter at their best.

The style of Accident, tonally and visually, is icy and reticent. Losey's shots are artfully and archly composed, sometimes forcing you to struggle for a moment with what you're seeing or with what part of the image you should be noticing. Many scenes seem drained of context and also of vitality—bright colors and even ambient sound have been leached out—but they're all presented as pregnant with meaning.

Having been enthralled by Accident since first encountering it on late night television over thirty years ago, later viewings left me with the sense that the film was a precursor to a second British New Wave... Accident is Losey's confessional, a self-examination of his own contradictions, his place in British cinema and of the medium at that time. Accident was not a step in a new direction; instead it is slamming of the door on his British cottage industry.

Despite its skillfully preserved narrative ambiguities, it's not a hip show; ACCIDENT is, in some sense, the anti-BLOWUP, acutely charting the gap between the encrusted primness of Oxford and a sexual revolution whose distant echoes are so faint that they probably register as a nasty rumor at best... ACCIDENT is ultimately closer to the time-shifting traumas of Resnais.

Accident charts the slow burn down to detonation, the tension mounting with the threat of violence. Losey and Pinter locate the pain that lurks deep within complacency, and the film positively throbs with it. It's an old idea, perhaps. But in their hands it hurts anew.

As adventurous in its own way as was Antonioni's Blow-Up a year prior.