It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is a major step in his career-long examination of justice and memory, blending the tension of a revenge thriller with the absurdist comedy that has always run through his work. The premise is deceptively simple: a family hits a dog, and a repair-shop worker kidnaps the driver, whom he believes tortured him, and drives him around Tehran. From that setup, Panahi builds a layered meditation on how societies process trauma inflicted by state repression.

What makes the film so effective is how accessibly it addresses its heavy political subject matter. Panahi never lectures; instead, he lets the ethical questions about collaboration, complicity, and the limits of retribution emerge through character and situation. The result is less a story about revenge than about the impossibility of satisfying it, and the comedy keeps the despair from becoming unbearable. This is among Panahi’s most invigorating works, and its final stretch is as intense and emotionally complex as anything released this year.