It Was Just an Accident

The Echo of a Squeak

If cinema is a machine for empathy, Jafar Panahi is its most persistent mechanic. For decades, the Iranian auteur has dismantled the vehicle of state oppression, often using the literal vehicle of a taxi or an SUV to navigate the social topography of Tehran. In *It Was Just an Accident*, the Palme d'Or-winning thriller that marks his first feature since his release from Evin Prison, Panahi trades the playful docufiction of *Taxi* for something far more jagged. This is not merely a film about the banality of evil; it is a film about the terrifying banality of memory, where a man’s nightmare is triggered not by a weapon, but by a sound.

The film’s inciting incident is almost Hitchcockian in its simplicity. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a soft-spoken mechanic whose face bears the permanent exhaustion of the formerly incarcerated, hears a noise. It is the squeak of a prosthetic leg belonging to a customer, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi). For Vahid, this specific friction of plastic on metal is the sonic signature of "Peg-Leg," the faceless jailer who tormented him years ago.



Panahi, working with cinematographer Amin Jafari, shoots these early scenes with a suffocating intimacy. The camera, often wedged into the tight corners of Vahid’s garage or the back of a van, refuses to grant the audience the relief of a wide shot. We are trapped in Vahid’s perspective, forced to scrutinize Eghbal’s mundane gestures for signs of monstrosity. Is this the architect of Vahid’s trauma, or just a clumsy man who hit a stray dog? The brilliance of the film’s visual language lies in this ambiguity; the thriller elements are stripped of Hollywood gloss, rendered instead in the stark, natural light of a Tehran that feels simultaneously expansive and like a prison yard.

As Vahid kidnaps Eghbal and drives him into the desert, the narrative expands into a perverse road trip. The film resists the catharsis of a revenge fantasy. Instead, Panahi introduces a Greek chorus of other victims—including a bride-to-be (Hadis Pakbaten) still in her wedding dress—to corroborate the identity of the captive.



Here, the film pivots from tension to a profound moral inquiry. The "accident" of the title refers not just to the car crash that opens the movie, but to the arbitrary nature of justice in an authoritarian state. Panahi seems to be asking: What does vengeance look like when the oppressor is just a man with a bad leg, terrified for his own family? The ensemble cast, particularly Mobasseri, delivers performances of quiet devastation. Vahid is not an action hero; he is a man trembling with the weight of a decision that the state usually makes for him. The confrontation is not physical but existential, fought in the cramped interior of a vehicle where the line between victim and victimizer blurs in the heat.



Ultimately, *It Was Just an Accident* is a testament to Panahi’s unyielding humanism. Even as he constructs a narrative fueled by the desire for retribution, he refuses to dehumanize the target of that rage. The film concludes not with a bang, but with a lingering silence that challenges the viewer to differentiate between justice and cruelty. In a career defined by restrictions—bans, house arrests, and prison sentences—Panahi has delivered his most liberated work yet, a film that argues that the only true prison is the cycle of violence itself.