Movie Review: Jafar Panahi’s ‘It Was Just an Accident’ is a darkly moving and funny look at revenge

The sputtering car comes to a stop outside a business. The driver comes out and asks those inside for help. He’s just trying to get his pregnant wife and precocious young daughter home.

But inside there’s someone who thinks he recognizes this soon-to-be father of two from a past life. He’s convinced that the guy was the same intelligence officer who tortured him for years in prison. Now is the time for revenge.

Written and directed by Jafar Panahi, “It Was Just an Accident” is obviously dark and yet wickedly funny, existential and very, very human as it explores the ripple effects from state violence and asks if forgiveness can ever be offered.

The movie, in Farsi with subtitles, is itself an act of defiance, since Panahi has been jailed for his work and is not legally allowed to make films in Iran, unwilling to have his scripts approved by the government.

Our main hero is Vahid , who we watch as recognizing in horror his old tormentor re-entering his life. Although he was blindfolded while imprisoned, Vahid recognizes the squeak of his interrogator’s prosthetic leg. The camera captures him as he impulsively but methodically abducts the man, takes him to the desert in a van and begins to bury him in the ground.

Wait, hold on. Is Vahid completely sure? The man in the shallow grave insists he’s not a torturer and argues a terrible mistake is being made. Vahid stuffs him in a large box in the van and goes back to the city to reconnect with a band of other former prisoners to ensure they’re making the proper identification. “I have a doubt,” he confesses to them.

We learn there is a world of once-tortured inmates who have learned to lead otherwise ordinary lives after leaving prison, some who lost years just for asking for missing government paychecks. They were interrogated and beaten, told their loved ones had abandoned them, had nooses put around their neck for hours and threatened with rape. “I am a zombie, one of the living dead,” one admits.

Vahid and three former blindfolded prisoners played by Mariam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten and Mohamad Ali Elaysmehr try to use all their senses: One tries to smell the captive, another listens to his voice and a third feels his leg scars, which he had been forced to do behind bars. Can they be certain the ID is correct? What do they do if it is? Might he be a victim, too?

“We aren’t killers. We’re not like them,” one argues. “If we let him go, he will trap us again,” argues another. “This is a quagmire,” argues another, quite correctly. “We are at war,” is one comment that sums them up as they begin to argue amongst themselves, an old foe dividing them anew.

A fabulous “Waiting for Godot” element descends on the movie as the former prisoners debate in a no-man’s land between life and death as the prisoner is ferried across the city during one long day. Panahi even references the Samuel Beckett play and mimics the setting.

Adding a surreal touch is Pakbaten, playing a bride-to-be wearing her wedding dress for a photo shoot and spending the day in it, driving around with her groom and pushing the van down the road when it breaks down, her fluffy white dress comical in such a grave situation.

Amid the debate over whether to kill their old tormentor or show him the humanity he never showed them, a complication emerges. There’s an emergency at their captor’s home and this ragtag band of broken, angry people come to help, an extraordinary kindness given the circumstances.

Panahi grounds his story in the dusty, street-level realism of modern Iran, with cars honking, dogs barking and crows making a ruckus. At seemingly every turn, people demand tips, from security guards to nurses and gas station attendants and street musicians — hands forever out, a system broken.

The movie has won the Palme d’Or and has been picked by France as its submission to the Academy Awards. That is no accident: Watch it and it will linger in your mind. It’s a movie for Iranians, of course, but it’s valuable for any society hoping to one day mend a divided country.

“It Was Just an Accident,” a Neon release that opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday followed by a national rollout, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for language and themes of torture. Running time: 102 minutes. Four stars out of four.

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