“It Was Just An Accident” Is An Oscar Worthy Gripping Tale of Revenge, Forgiveness, And One of Best Films of the year!!

By Evan L. Jackson 

    Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just An Accident” will shock you out of your apathy and grip you from scene to scene. Jafar’s latest installment is about the tale of a man who sees one of his captors as the man who ruined his life as he accidentally comes across his auto body shop. Just by the mere sound of his walking he knew this was the man who tortured him and essentially destroyed his world. What’s equally breathtaking is that Jafar had made this film in secret without the approval of the Iranian government, drawing from his previous experience of making a film and being jailed up to three months. Wow! Winning at the Palme d’ Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival is only the beginning of its awards season acclaim. Variety has the film predicted to be nominated for Best International Film and Best Picture at the upcoming Oscars. Jafar explores those feelings and puts us in his shoes throughout the film, the sound design works as a Hitchkockian plot device that is the backbone of the film and the main question of the film call us out as an audience: what is the end to your means when it comes to revenge?

    In the Q&A hosted by Neon, following a special screening of the film, Jafar addressed the lack of a score saying the he intently wanted the audience to focus in on the sound design. The characters within the film explicitly remembered their captor by his smell, by the squeak of his artificial limb and by the terror he instilled with his voice. Jafar made you feel that same heightened sense of dread, leaving the audience just like them: imprisoned, trapped and living moment to moment in an unpredictable state. Jafar uses his pain experience as a point of reference, in the Q&A he explains when he was imprisoned that being blindfolded he was forced to hone in his other senses to have clues on who his captor was. These sensory memories seared into his core and he vividly translates this to film. Trauma bonding has no language barrier. Pain, feeing hurt and helpless is a shared experience when a system wants to see you fail and break you. 

   Seeing the film I was squirming in my seat, beside my Young Bold And Regal media correspondent Devin Monet who equally was unsettled placing her hand by her mouth anticipating a horrifying scene or better yet a moment that would have her relieved. No relaxation in sight! Jafar Panahi’s masterpiece is so tense that when there are humane and even interesting moments where the characters explain their catharsis on the matter it feels like therapy. A flood of emotions on their time being imprisoned and slowly recovering from it, if at all. So ironic that they had captured the one who imprisoned them, even blind folded him but he was the one who kept them in terror still. Their seek for revenge was so intense that they were blinded by it, only to be broken by the humanity of their captor’s daughter desperate to save her pregnant mom who had past out at home. The usage of the color red especially at night, felt like an interrogation room adding to the horror inspired scenes feeling like an old school Alfred Hitchcock film, where it keeps the audience captivated yet seeking relief from its intensity. The aspect of forgiveness creeps into the script but not the way you think. Forgiveness in films feels like a timely mea culpa that becomes cliche but what’s refreshing about this film it shows the messy and complicated journey of what that means.

  The act of forgiveness isn’t fully seen through the film because it displays its messy beginnings and murky ends. As the last scenes come about the main character is seen loading a truck with baby supplies, only scenes after the pregnant mom had a healthy baby boy. What’s going on?! My immediate thought and without hesitation Jafar does it as a filmmaker, he makes one of the best scenes in film this year. The “Peg Leg”, the man who imprisoned our main characters, is not on scene but you hear the eerie, horror tinged squeak over and over and over. That is what Jafar leaves you with. That those you seek revenge on will always haunt you, literally or even more so mentally with the memories they’ve left in your mind.