It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Directed by Jafar Panahi
An unassuming mechanic is reminded of his time in an Iranian prison when he encounters a man he suspects to be his sadistic jailhouse captor.
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19 films that influenced It Was Just an Accident
What critics say influenced It Was Just an Accident
Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, for instance, speaks volumes on local judicial functioning over a couple’s domestic drama…
As with “A Separation” and “Woman and Child,” its fellow Cannes entry from Iran this year, the ever-escalating series of events in “It Was Just an Accident” makes a potent thriller.
Mahmoud Rassoulouf’s stressful docudrama The Seed of the Sacred Fig breaks down a family when a state judge’s personal gun goes missing…
…his contemporary Mohammad Rasoulof (last year’s Cannes competition title “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”)…
There’s a neo-realist quality to the setting and characterisation that’s reminiscent of “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) or “Umberto D” (1952).
Is Panahi a fan of the Coen Brothers’ “Blood Simple” (1984)?
Comparisons to neo-western classics like No Country for Old Men and Hell or High Water are fully warranted as It Was Just An Accident is the kind of engrossing thriller that despite its clear political undercurrent is simply an engrossing story that’s exceptionally well told.
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It sounds like the beginning of a joke straight out of a 90s comedy, like Weekend at Bernie's and Very Bad Things.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke straight out of a 90s comedy, like Weekend at Bernie's and Very Bad Things.
When thinking of other ‘political’ Palme wins, the blatancy of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 still lingers in the minds of some, but we’re a long way from that kind of agitprop…
On Beckett, rather than any one film
…a political thriller wrapped in a Beckettian farce…
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On Hitchcock, rather than any one film
The way Panahi blends suspense with dark humor is a skill we haven’t seen displayed so skillfully since perhaps the best days of Alfred Hitchcock.
On Chaplin, rather than any one film
It’s a method akin to that of Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Nast, satirists who believed mockery to be infinitely more lethal than bombs and bullets…