Written and Directed by Jafar Panahi | 105 min | ▲▲▲
An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI in September during the Atlantic International Film Festival 2025
The movie that wins the Palme d’Or comes weighted with expectations that sometimes end up being too heavy for the picture to carry — by no fault of the filmmakers. For what it’s worth, movies like Anatomy of a Fall and Titane, while fascinating and challenging, wouldn’t have earned my vote.
It Was Just An Accident is the 2025 winner, and is an impressive effort in many ways. It should also be considered in light of Panahi’s body of work — he’s an activist filmmaker who is frequently imprisoned by the Iranian regime for his films. This award feels like a recognition that his level of difficulty in filmmaking is many times higher than someone who gets to create work in a less oppressive and dangerous place.
It should also be noted that this is a spiritual remake of Death And The Maiden, the Ariel Dorfman play turned Roman Polanski film, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. It tells the story of a woman who was imprisoned, tortured and raped during the authoritarian dictatorship of an unnamed South American country — though Chile is heavily implied. When we meet her it’s years later and she’s married and happy, but with her husband encounters a doctor whose voice she thinks is so familiar — she is convinced he was the one who brutalized her while she was blindfolded in prison. She takes violent measures to confirm his identity.
It doesn’t delegitimize Jafar’s film that he should be inspired by the earlier work and apply its themes to his own project, but it gave me pause. Panahi takes the story of a former prisoner and splits her into five very different characters. It allows the characters (and the film) to debate the rights and wrongs of their actions while they kidnap this man who may, or may not, be the guy who tortured them. The man in question remains largely silent until the final 20 minutes.
Jafar’s film is about the broad societal trauma that comes from a totalitarian regime torturing its citizens, and how it manifests differently in those victims. It starts with an average working guy who thinks he’s discovered the officer who tortured him years before, leaving him with lifelong pain — he captures and beats the man, locking him in the back of his van. He then tracks down four other former prisoners to help him confirm he’s got the right guy.
The middle act of the film turns into a comedic caper (a surprise given the darkness of the concept) as this motley crew spends a day driving around town arguing about what to do, struggling to reach a consensus — Panahi likes to stage his dramas (and comedies) in vehicles, maybe because it’s safer to shoot in them than out on the street.
At one point two of the characters venture to their prisoner’s home to offer help to his pregnant wife and daughter, which feels wildly implausible that they’d go to such trouble, but then the themes here are never less than direct and distinct — it’s brutality versus compassion, revenge versus mercy. It’s in all of us and we get to choose how we want to live, whatever our past experience or present day suffering.
