In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator. Sotoudeh tells him that many of her clients report the same experience, a lingering effect of being blindfolded during prison interrogations. The conversation soon shifts elsewhere, almost casually. A decade later, Panahi returned to that fleeting moment of fear and turned it into the central narrative and emotional core of It Was Just an Accident.
The film made Jafar Panahi only the second Iranian director, after Abbas Kiarostami, to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious prize in world art cinema. Yet despite the film’s widespread international acclaim, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, reactions within Iranian cultural circles have been divided. Some Iranian academics and artists have charged that the film is a derivative and shallow political thriller, tailored to Western festival audiences with limited knowledge of Iran’s sociopolitical complexities. I believe these critics are missing how Panahi turns a political thriller into a vehicle for exploring a deeper, ethical dilemma, one that has preoccupied Iranians over the past decade: How should they stand up to a theocratic regime that has ruled the country for nearly half a century and, in the eyes of many, brought it nothing but misery, especially when the avenues of reform and gradual change now seem closed?
The film follows a group of former political prisoners who must decide whether to take revenge on a man they believe was their interrogator and torturer. Panahi turns this revenge plot into a microcosm of Iranian society in order to point to the larger ethical and political impasse in which millions of Iranians find themselves. In this sense, Panahi practices film as philosophy, using cinema to meditate on a difficult ethical question for which there is no easy answer. In doing so, he develops a new cinematic style: a form of political realism that focuses directly on the conflict between citizens and the state, departing from the realist modes previously elaborated by other Iranian directors.
Panahi draws on the two dominant realist tendencies in contemporary Iranian cinema, associated with Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, while forging a distinctive style of his own. From Kiarostami he adopts two familiar motifs: the car and the road trip. Although both have appeared in Panahi’s earlier work, in It Was Just an Accident he uses them with greater narrative precision and control. The van becomes a space that is at once claustrophobic and intimate. Packed inside the vehicle, the five passengers argue over what to do with the intelligence agent they believe once tortured them in prison. Yet the journey also binds them together, generating a fragile sense of solidarity against a common enemy. Kiarostami has said that the automobile creates a peculiar social environment that blurs the boundary between public and private space: its occupants move through the public sphere while inhabiting a temporary interior that permits a degree of privacy, however precarious and uncomfortable. Panahi exploits this ambiguity. The van becomes a mobile arena of confrontation and reluctant camaraderie, and the uneasy atmosphere is sharpened by the secret concealed in the back: the suspected interrogator locked inside a large toolbox.
From Farhadi, Panahi adopts a dramatic intensity rooted in tense exchanges and sharp verbal confrontations. More importantly, he draws on Farhadi’s model of interpersonal and social drama to create a mystery thriller in which conversation does not clarify the situation but complicates it. The more the characters interact, the more uncertain they become, and the less capable they are of resolving the dilemma before them. Like Farhadi, Panahi uses dialogue as a vehicle for moral inquiry. As the characters debate what to do, each comes to embody a distinct ethical position. They can thus be understood as distinct voices through which Panahi approaches a moral question from different angles.
Some of the criticism leveled at It Was Just an Accident by Iranian artists and intellectuals stems rom its similarities to Farhadi’s films. It Was Just an Accident is often seen as a weaker, less fully realized version of a Farhadi-esque social drama. Critics describe the acting as shallow, amateurish and at times exaggerated, arguing that the figures on screen function more as types than as psychologically complex characters. I share some of these reservations. Yet such limitations cannot be separated from the conditions of underground filmmaking: nonprofessional actors, limited time and resources, and the constant surveillance of a brutal regime that has repeatedly harassed and imprisoned Panahi (he’s currently facing a one-year prison sentence, just upheld by an Iranian court last week, on charges of “propaganda activities” against the state). What may seem hurried and imprecise may also reflect the pressure under which the film was made.
Still, to view It Was Just an Accident primarily through the lens of Farhadi’s cinema is to miss what Panahi is trying to accomplish. Panahi has long worked within a tradition of dissident cinema, one in which characters resist social norms, defy legal restrictions and confront political authority. This spirit of defiance runs through films such as The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006). After the 2009 Green Movement, when Panahi was arrested and later sentenced to a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, his work took on a more explicitly reflexive form. In This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015) and No Bears (2022), he appears onscreen as himself, foregrounding both artistic prohibition and the clandestine conditions of production. In It Was Just an Accident, however, Panahi sets aside that reflexive mode for a political thriller driven by sharp confrontations, raw anger and profanity-laced dialogue at times reminiscent of a Martin Scorsese gangster film. That resemblance may help explain Scorsese’s admiration for the film. But instead of mobsters navigating the violent codes of the underworld, Panahi gives us a cat-and-mouse struggle between former political prisoners and the intelligence apparatus of the state.
As the political prisoners discuss competing responses to repression, the intelligence officer they capture stands in for the security forces of the regime. At this point, the film becomes a laboratory, reducing complex social positions to a small set of figures in order to pit them against one another. At the level of individual psychology, this model is necessarily reductive, which helps explain why the characters appear less as fully developed individuals than as recognizable political types. Yet that very simplification allows Panahi to dramatize the political opinions that coexist within Iranian society. For Iranian viewers, these figures are immediately recognizable, with clear counterparts in everyday social life. After more than four decades of sustained state intrusion into both private and public spheres, questions of how to confront the regime have become a pervasive part of political consciousness.
Panahi suggests that the range of possible responses to state repression is not unlimited. At one end of the spectrum stands Salar, the bookstore manager, who places his faith in cultural work as a mode of resistance, rather than direct protest. At the other end is Hamid, a furious young man who insists on killing and burying the officer they believe to be Eghbal (“Peg Leg”) because he is convinced that if they do not act first, Eghbal will eventually come after them. Vahid, the driver, and Shiva, the photographer, fall somewhere between these poles: they seek to bring Eghbal to justice, but only under fair conditions that would allow him to defend himself. In other words, they refuse to reproduce the violence and injustice that they themselves had endured under interrogation. Goli, the bride, who was sexually assaulted in prison, is consumed by anger and desperate to identify Eghbal, though she is unsure what to do with him. Her groom Ali, by contrast, represents a form of complicity grounded not in ideological conviction but in material interest: as the son of a reformist, he benefits financially and professionally from maintaining his silence.
While Panahi allows these positions to unfold in dialogue throughout the film, nowhere are they staged more clearly than in the “Godot scene” that comes at the beginning of the film’s second hour. Beneath a solitary barren tree, he creates a minimalist, abstract space in the desert that acts as a kind of controlled experiment wherein competing perspectives confront one another without resolution. Hamid and Shiva debate their opposing positions; at one point, Hamid invokes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, recalling a performance they once attended together. The reference deepens the scene’s atmosphere of suspense and ethical uncertainty, while also pointing to the absurdist humor that Panahi intermittently uses to make the film’s emotional burden more bearable.
In the penultimate scene, only Vahid and Shiva remain. They drive Eghbal to the outskirts of Tehran at night, tie him to a tree, and force a confession before passing judgment. The vulgar language, slaps and kicks, and the characters’ cries, all bathed in the van’s red light, make this extended medium close-up both emotionally tense and physically suffocating. At the same time, their words and actions expose a deeper vulnerability rooted in the trauma of torture and interrogation. Here Panahi reveals Eghbal as a far more agile and manipulative figure than he first appears, continuing to outmaneuver Shiva and Vahid even when he seems to be at their mercy. Eghbal initially denies the accusations, but once he realizes that Vahid had helped his pregnant wife reach the hospital, he begins to test Vahid’s moral limits. Sensing that Vahid is incapable of killing him, Eghbal shifts strategy, openly declaring his identity, invoking his military credentials and belittling Vahid for his lack of power. This display of arrogance provokes Shiva’s fury. She lashes out verbally and physically, threatening to kill him and to expose him publicly by posting a naked photograph for his son to see—a brutal reversal of the humiliation he once inflicted on her in prison. When Eghbal realizes that Shiva’s rage poses a real danger, he changes course once again, invoking his troubled childhood and his responsibilities as a father to elicit sympathy and secure forgiveness.
Vahid and Shiva’s decision to spare Eghbal’s life has led many reviewers to read the film as an endorsement of forgiveness, assuming that Panahi aligns himself with his protagonists as moral agents who reject revenge and seek to break the cycle of violence. The final scene, however, unsettles this interpretation. The following day, as Vahid prepares the van for his sister’s baby shower, a white Peugeot resembling Eghbal’s car pulls up nearby. As Vahid steps inside to retrieve something, he suddenly freezes when he hears the faint, unmistakable squeak of a prosthetic leg approaching. In this haunting moment, Panahi remains faithful to the ethical dilemma that structures the film. Rather than endorsing any of the solutions proposed by the characters as a viable path out of this impasse, he suggests that each carries grave consequences. Letting Eghbal go neither restores peace nor guarantees safety. This unresolved ending reflects a broader anxiety shared by many Iranians: how to confront a violent theocratic apparatus without becoming trapped in its logic.
Panahi constructs this microcosm of Iranian society out of an acute sensitivity to the political impasse of his historical moment. More than any other Iranian director, he registers the condition of Iranians under an authoritarian regime with unusual precision. Three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-2023, and only seven months after It Was Just an Accident premiered at Cannes, a new wave of nationwide protests erupted in late December 2025. The protests soon took on an explicitly political character, as demonstrators began calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. By January 8 and 9, 2026, the uprising had spread to more than four hundred cities, towns and villages, drawing millions into the streets in what became the largest protests since the 1979 Revolution. The state responded with unprecedented violence. Revolutionary Guards opened fire on unarmed protesters, carrying out the deadliest massacre in the country’s modern history.
It Was Just an Accident works like a seismograph, detecting the pressures and anxieties beneath the surface of Iranian society. Along with Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), it belongs to a new current in Iranian cinema: political thrillers that have emerged in the wake of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and engage the present historical moment with unusual political and critical directness. Panahi captures the anger and sense of entrapment felt by many Iranians today while recognizing that there is no easy or obvious way out of this deadlock. The film’s power lies precisely in its refusal to resolve that contradiction. It leaves us with the unbearable question that haunts both the characters and the society they represent: how to resist a violent political system without surrendering to it or reproducing its violence.
In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator. Sotoudeh tells him that many of her clients report the same experience, a lingering effect of being blindfolded during prison interrogations. The conversation soon shifts elsewhere, almost casually. A decade later, Panahi returned to that fleeting moment of fear and turned it into the central narrative and emotional core of It Was Just an Accident.
The film made Jafar Panahi only the second Iranian director, after Abbas Kiarostami, to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious prize in world art cinema. Yet despite the film’s widespread international acclaim, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, reactions within Iranian cultural circles have been divided. Some Iranian academics and artists have charged that the film is a derivative and shallow political thriller, tailored to Western festival audiences with limited knowledge of Iran’s sociopolitical complexities. I believe these critics are missing how Panahi turns a political thriller into a vehicle for exploring a deeper, ethical dilemma, one that has preoccupied Iranians over the past decade: How should they stand up to a theocratic regime that has ruled the country for nearly half a century and, in the eyes of many, brought it nothing but misery, especially when the avenues of reform and gradual change now seem closed?
The film follows a group of former political prisoners who must decide whether to take revenge on a man they believe was their interrogator and torturer. Panahi turns this revenge plot into a microcosm of Iranian society in order to point to the larger ethical and political impasse in which millions of Iranians find themselves. In this sense, Panahi practices film as philosophy, using cinema to meditate on a difficult ethical question for which there is no easy answer. In doing so, he develops a new cinematic style: a form of political realism that focuses directly on the conflict between citizens and the state, departing from the realist modes previously elaborated by other Iranian directors.
Panahi draws on the two dominant realist tendencies in contemporary Iranian cinema, associated with Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, while forging a distinctive style of his own. From Kiarostami he adopts two familiar motifs: the car and the road trip. Although both have appeared in Panahi’s earlier work, in It Was Just an Accident he uses them with greater narrative precision and control. The van becomes a space that is at once claustrophobic and intimate. Packed inside the vehicle, the five passengers argue over what to do with the intelligence agent they believe once tortured them in prison. Yet the journey also binds them together, generating a fragile sense of solidarity against a common enemy. Kiarostami has said that the automobile creates a peculiar social environment that blurs the boundary between public and private space: its occupants move through the public sphere while inhabiting a temporary interior that permits a degree of privacy, however precarious and uncomfortable. Panahi exploits this ambiguity. The van becomes a mobile arena of confrontation and reluctant camaraderie, and the uneasy atmosphere is sharpened by the secret concealed in the back: the suspected interrogator locked inside a large toolbox.
From Farhadi, Panahi adopts a dramatic intensity rooted in tense exchanges and sharp verbal confrontations. More importantly, he draws on Farhadi’s model of interpersonal and social drama to create a mystery thriller in which conversation does not clarify the situation but complicates it. The more the characters interact, the more uncertain they become, and the less capable they are of resolving the dilemma before them. Like Farhadi, Panahi uses dialogue as a vehicle for moral inquiry. As the characters debate what to do, each comes to embody a distinct ethical position. They can thus be understood as distinct voices through which Panahi approaches a moral question from different angles.
Some of the criticism leveled at It Was Just an Accident by Iranian artists and intellectuals stems rom its similarities to Farhadi’s films. It Was Just an Accident is often seen as a weaker, less fully realized version of a Farhadi-esque social drama. Critics describe the acting as shallow, amateurish and at times exaggerated, arguing that the figures on screen function more as types than as psychologically complex characters. I share some of these reservations. Yet such limitations cannot be separated from the conditions of underground filmmaking: nonprofessional actors, limited time and resources, and the constant surveillance of a brutal regime that has repeatedly harassed and imprisoned Panahi (he’s currently facing a one-year prison sentence, just upheld by an Iranian court last week, on charges of “propaganda activities” against the state). What may seem hurried and imprecise may also reflect the pressure under which the film was made.
Still, to view It Was Just an Accident primarily through the lens of Farhadi’s cinema is to miss what Panahi is trying to accomplish. Panahi has long worked within a tradition of dissident cinema, one in which characters resist social norms, defy legal restrictions and confront political authority. This spirit of defiance runs through films such as The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006). After the 2009 Green Movement, when Panahi was arrested and later sentenced to a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, his work took on a more explicitly reflexive form. In This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015) and No Bears (2022), he appears onscreen as himself, foregrounding both artistic prohibition and the clandestine conditions of production. In It Was Just an Accident, however, Panahi sets aside that reflexive mode for a political thriller driven by sharp confrontations, raw anger and profanity-laced dialogue at times reminiscent of a Martin Scorsese gangster film. That resemblance may help explain Scorsese’s admiration for the film. But instead of mobsters navigating the violent codes of the underworld, Panahi gives us a cat-and-mouse struggle between former political prisoners and the intelligence apparatus of the state.
As the political prisoners discuss competing responses to repression, the intelligence officer they capture stands in for the security forces of the regime. At this point, the film becomes a laboratory, reducing complex social positions to a small set of figures in order to pit them against one another. At the level of individual psychology, this model is necessarily reductive, which helps explain why the characters appear less as fully developed individuals than as recognizable political types. Yet that very simplification allows Panahi to dramatize the political opinions that coexist within Iranian society. For Iranian viewers, these figures are immediately recognizable, with clear counterparts in everyday social life. After more than four decades of sustained state intrusion into both private and public spheres, questions of how to confront the regime have become a pervasive part of political consciousness.
Panahi suggests that the range of possible responses to state repression is not unlimited. At one end of the spectrum stands Salar, the bookstore manager, who places his faith in cultural work as a mode of resistance, rather than direct protest. At the other end is Hamid, a furious young man who insists on killing and burying the officer they believe to be Eghbal (“Peg Leg”) because he is convinced that if they do not act first, Eghbal will eventually come after them. Vahid, the driver, and Shiva, the photographer, fall somewhere between these poles: they seek to bring Eghbal to justice, but only under fair conditions that would allow him to defend himself. In other words, they refuse to reproduce the violence and injustice that they themselves had endured under interrogation. Goli, the bride, who was sexually assaulted in prison, is consumed by anger and desperate to identify Eghbal, though she is unsure what to do with him. Her groom Ali, by contrast, represents a form of complicity grounded not in ideological conviction but in material interest: as the son of a reformist, he benefits financially and professionally from maintaining his silence.
While Panahi allows these positions to unfold in dialogue throughout the film, nowhere are they staged more clearly than in the “Godot scene” that comes at the beginning of the film’s second hour. Beneath a solitary barren tree, he creates a minimalist, abstract space in the desert that acts as a kind of controlled experiment wherein competing perspectives confront one another without resolution. Hamid and Shiva debate their opposing positions; at one point, Hamid invokes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, recalling a performance they once attended together. The reference deepens the scene’s atmosphere of suspense and ethical uncertainty, while also pointing to the absurdist humor that Panahi intermittently uses to make the film’s emotional burden more bearable.
In the penultimate scene, only Vahid and Shiva remain. They drive Eghbal to the outskirts of Tehran at night, tie him to a tree, and force a confession before passing judgment. The vulgar language, slaps and kicks, and the characters’ cries, all bathed in the van’s red light, make this extended medium close-up both emotionally tense and physically suffocating. At the same time, their words and actions expose a deeper vulnerability rooted in the trauma of torture and interrogation. Here Panahi reveals Eghbal as a far more agile and manipulative figure than he first appears, continuing to outmaneuver Shiva and Vahid even when he seems to be at their mercy. Eghbal initially denies the accusations, but once he realizes that Vahid had helped his pregnant wife reach the hospital, he begins to test Vahid’s moral limits. Sensing that Vahid is incapable of killing him, Eghbal shifts strategy, openly declaring his identity, invoking his military credentials and belittling Vahid for his lack of power. This display of arrogance provokes Shiva’s fury. She lashes out verbally and physically, threatening to kill him and to expose him publicly by posting a naked photograph for his son to see—a brutal reversal of the humiliation he once inflicted on her in prison. When Eghbal realizes that Shiva’s rage poses a real danger, he changes course once again, invoking his troubled childhood and his responsibilities as a father to elicit sympathy and secure forgiveness.
Vahid and Shiva’s decision to spare Eghbal’s life has led many reviewers to read the film as an endorsement of forgiveness, assuming that Panahi aligns himself with his protagonists as moral agents who reject revenge and seek to break the cycle of violence. The final scene, however, unsettles this interpretation. The following day, as Vahid prepares the van for his sister’s baby shower, a white Peugeot resembling Eghbal’s car pulls up nearby. As Vahid steps inside to retrieve something, he suddenly freezes when he hears the faint, unmistakable squeak of a prosthetic leg approaching. In this haunting moment, Panahi remains faithful to the ethical dilemma that structures the film. Rather than endorsing any of the solutions proposed by the characters as a viable path out of this impasse, he suggests that each carries grave consequences. Letting Eghbal go neither restores peace nor guarantees safety. This unresolved ending reflects a broader anxiety shared by many Iranians: how to confront a violent theocratic apparatus without becoming trapped in its logic.
Panahi constructs this microcosm of Iranian society out of an acute sensitivity to the political impasse of his historical moment. More than any other Iranian director, he registers the condition of Iranians under an authoritarian regime with unusual precision. Three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-2023, and only seven months after It Was Just an Accident premiered at Cannes, a new wave of nationwide protests erupted in late December 2025. The protests soon took on an explicitly political character, as demonstrators began calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. By January 8 and 9, 2026, the uprising had spread to more than four hundred cities, towns and villages, drawing millions into the streets in what became the largest protests since the 1979 Revolution. The state responded with unprecedented violence. Revolutionary Guards opened fire on unarmed protesters, carrying out the deadliest massacre in the country’s modern history.
It Was Just an Accident works like a seismograph, detecting the pressures and anxieties beneath the surface of Iranian society. Along with Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), it belongs to a new current in Iranian cinema: political thrillers that have emerged in the wake of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and engage the present historical moment with unusual political and critical directness. Panahi captures the anger and sense of entrapment felt by many Iranians today while recognizing that there is no easy or obvious way out of this deadlock. The film’s power lies precisely in its refusal to resolve that contradiction. It leaves us with the unbearable question that haunts both the characters and the society they represent: how to resist a violent political system without surrendering to it or reproducing its violence.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.