The Brooklyn Rail

The history of Iranian cinema can be read—at least along one of its central lines—as a history of revenge and the pursuit of individual justice. In the absence of trustworthy judicial institutions, social crises and enduring authoritarian structures have repeatedly displaced justice from the realm of law into that of personal action. Individuals thus emerge who assume the role of judge and executioner, caught between the restitution of rights and the reproduction of violence.

This logic has become a recurring foundation of narrative imagination in Iranian cinema. From Qeysar (1969), which frames violence as the sole means of reclaiming dignity in a lawless society; through Tight Spot (1973) and The Salesman (2016), where justice is relocated to the unstable terrain of ethics and doubt; to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025), the central question persists: how can justice be reclaimed—if at all—in a society marked by insecurity and structural injustice? These films operate within a mode of realism that is less concerned with representation than with testing the limits of ethical decision-making under pressure.

It Was Just an Accident situates this recurring logic within a tightly circumscribed encounter: a chance incident brings an intelligence officer—implicated in past acts of violence—into the hands of ordinary citizens who possess neither legal authority nor institutional recourse. Deprived of courts, law, or any guarantee of justice, they are forced to confront the familiar dilemma of Iranian cinema firsthand—whether to assume the role of judge and executioner, or to relinquish action altogether—thus translating the historical problem of individual justice into an immediate ethical crisis structured by accident rather than intention.

Before asking to what extent It Was Just an Accident is “realistic,” we must first clarify which kind of reality is at stake. Does reality here signify a direct representation of the social world? Or should the value of realism be measured by the internal logic of the narrative? In fact, the film’s tone and execution closely align with the reality of Iranian society, yet—contrary to that—its narrative is built upon coincidence and fate, with generic elements converging to enable the realization of individual justice within an unjust system; elements that traditionally, more than being tied to realism, serve as the raw material of melodrama. In melodrama, coincidence is never neutral: it carries moral punishment, emotional revelation, or an opportunity for redemption. Panahi’s film, however, deliberately distances itself from this logic.

True to its title, It Was Just an Accident attempts to deploy coincidence and fate within the order of reality stripped of their conventional semantic and generic weight. What emerges is a form of magical realism embedded within the discipline of a system that recognizes no individuality for its citizens. Consequently, the narrative works to empty generic elements of their melodramatic function. The accident does not culminate in an emotional climax, nor does it carry a clearly articulated moral message. Fate, likewise, assumes neither a tragic form nor a reward-and-punishment structure; instead, it appears as a chronic disturbance within the fabric of everyday life. This refusal of overt “meaning-making” marks the film’s first decisive step away from genre convention. But does this distancing bring the film closer to realism? The answer depends on the position of the viewer—specifically, whether that viewer is Iranian or non-Iranian.

For the Iranian spectator, Panahi’s film is experienced less as a realist narrative than as a series of exaggerations and ruptures in reality, where actions seem driven toward meaning rather than arising organically from the situation. Non-Iranian viewers, by contrast, tend not to register these ruptures as disruptions of realism. This difference is cultural: because Iranian spectators live within the very social order the film depicts, even minor exaggerations in performance appear constructed, while the same elements may read to non-Iranian viewers as intensity or formal boldness. Ultimately, this divergence underscores that acting itself is a culturally conditioned practice, lacking a universal or fixed standard by which it can be definitively judged.

The issue, then, is not whether the film exaggerates, but where that exaggeration occurs and in relation to which lived experience. For the non-Iranian viewer, the world of the film remains an “other”: a distant, political, tense, and repressive space whose internal logic is apprehended through narrative cues and signs. In such a mode of engagement, realism functions less as an experiential criterion than as a narrative and persuasive one. For the Iranian spectator, however, this world is not an other but an extension of everyday life; and it is precisely this proximity that renders any formal slippage immediately perceptible. Thus, while the shadow of magical realism may justify deviations from causal logic at the level of narrative, this justification does not necessarily extend to the level of performance. What is acceptable as a meaningful disturbance within narrative logic can, at the level of acting and action, fall out of sync with the cultural memory and lived patterns of the Iranian spectator, and is instead experienced as a tangible distance. This distance neither negates the film’s overall realism nor invalidates the logic of magical realism; rather, it signals a gap between the constructed narrative order and the lived experience upon which the film is built.

Magical realism, contrary to common assumptions, does not arise from abstract poetic fantasy but from lived experience under oppressive conditions, as an aesthetic response to the breakdown of reality’s internal logic. It is therefore no coincidence that Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, a narrative touchstone for It Was Just an Accident, operates within a similar logic. In both works, chance encounters replace formal mechanisms of justice, forcing characters into confrontations in spaces where the law has already retreated.

The crucial difference between Death and the Maiden and Panahi’s film lies in the question of truth’s disclosure. In It Was Just an Accident, the identity of the intelligence officer is ultimately revealed, and he himself confesses to his own depravity—an ending in which the officer, named Eghbal, loudly proclaims his apparent remorse and begs for forgiveness. Death and the Maiden, by contrast, stands within a post-dictatorial horizon, where the central concern is not the exposure of truth but the possibility of living with truth left unspoken. Dorfman’s world is one in which repression has formally ended, yet justice has not been restored to order.

The ending of Panahi’s film unfolds within a condition still “in progress,” where violence has neither faded into memory nor settled into history. In this context, the intelligence officer’s confession is less an ethical resolution than a historical necessity: the forced articulation of what cannot yet be spoken otherwise. The film ultimately diverges from Death and the Maiden in its affective outcome. Where Dorfman’s work ends in anxiety produced by unspoken truths, It Was Just an Accident concludes with fear—the persistent fear of the intelligence officer. The final sound of footsteps, suspended between hallucination and reality, marks this difference precisely: anxiety lacks an object, but fear is always fear of something. It is here that the film’s ending most closely aligns with social reality.

Beyond the exposure of an intelligence officer’s identity, the film poses a fundamental ethical question—one brought into being by the mechanisms of accident and fate. The issue is not whether this man deserves punishment, but rather what an individual ought to do when confronted with evil in the absence of law, courts, and justice itself. The film’s ethical situations crystallize precisely at this juncture: Should the intelligence officer be killed or released? Should his pregnant wife be taken to the hospital, or should she too be sacrificed in the name of revenge? Killing the officer may be justifiable within a logic of retaliatory justice, yet it simultaneously perpetuates the very logic of violence he embodies. Letting him go, on the other hand, is neither an act of forgiveness nor a gesture of moral purification; it is a bitter acknowledgment that evil cannot be eradicated through a single decisive act—it can only be deferred.

From this perspective, accident and fate function as mechanisms that compel the characters toward ethical decision-making in a situation where no just solution exists. It Was Just an Accident is less concerned with putting an intelligence officer on trial than with asking how—or whether—a human being can remain ethical when justice is impossible. The sound of the artificial footsteps—the officer having lost one of his legs in the war—linked from the very beginning of the film to bodily memory, pain, and violence, is the consequence of an ethical choice. Releasing the intelligence officer signifies a refusal of the logic of erasure and killing, yet this choice brings no peace. It is precisely here that the film is most honest: ethics offers neither redemption nor security. The sound of the artificial steps is not the return of the repressed, but a reminder of the price that must be paid for choosing not to kill. If murder were a means of silencing this sound, the film deliberately refuses it—not because violence is condemned in the abstract, but because the silence produced by violence would be a false calm. Ethical choice here amounts to an acceptance of coexistence with fear.

In this sense, the film argues that being human—especially under conditions of injustice—inevitably entails living with anxiety. Ethics offers neither safety nor redemption; it merely prevents one from fully becoming an executioner. The lingering sound of footsteps marks the cost of this refusal: choosing not to kill, even at the expense of security and certainty. The film thus ends not in moral failure, but in ethical fulfillment—insisting that ethics, without justice, always carries a price.