Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) drives home late at night with his wife and young daughter. Due to the open landscape of Iran and the dark conditions, he hits a wild dog. This causes his car to break down a few miles later. Luckily, there’s a mechanic not far down the road who’s still open at this time of night and agrees to fix his car. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is one of the mechanics, and, in the void of darkness and silence, hears the limping squeak of Rashid’s prosthetic leg. It’s a sound that sends a shiver down his spine, as it exactly replicates what he heard as he was being tortured by the infamous guard known as Peg Leg over the months he was detained for protesting.

Despite its title and initial set of circumstances being born out of coincidence, the creation of It Was Just an Accident is purely intentional. Writer/director Jafar Panahi has been a fervently political filmmaker for over thirty years. Despite securing a historic bevy of awards at the Cannes Film Festival for The White Balloon, he was forbidden from promoting the film in the United States on government orders. It would mark the only film of his career to screen in his home country, the rest all being banned on the grounds of anti-government propaganda. He was arrested in 2010 on that charge, imprisoned in confinement for months until he was released on house arrest. A string of docufiction hybrids was born out of this restriction, including the aptly titled This Is Not a Film, which had to be smuggled out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a cake.

Panahi was arrested again in 2022, the third director to be detained in a week, along with Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig) and Mostafa Aleahmad. His eventual release was spurred several months later by a hunger strike. Like his previous decade of output, It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret without any permits from the government. But unlike those other films, this is a work of scorching anger, with its unwavering sights set directly on his former captors. This is a thriller in the purest sense of the word, where the suspense of the story stretches far beyond the borders of the silver screen.

Determining that a moment like this will never come again, Vahid kidnaps Rashid and locks him in a crate in the back of his van. Rashid denies all claims over his identity, which creates just enough doubt for Vashid to seek out second opinions from his fellow inmates. They are Shiva, a wedding photographer; Goli, the bride at one of Shiva’s shoots; and Hamid, a chaos agent with the most vivid memory of his torturer. Like a jury, all of them must come together to verify the identity beyond a reasonable doubt.

Panahi lets these events unfold in a natural progression, never overtly telling us what’s going on or why it’s happening. It’s a slow build-up of tension, with the weight of the filmmaking and performances illustrating all that we need to know about the importance of this moment. Of course, there’s a thick layer of irony in the fact that this review, along with all other press coverage of the movie, eliminates much of those feelings by revealing the synopsis.

But Panahi is always one step ahead, imbuing the proceedings with a healthy slice of Coen-esque dark comedy. Vahid is not a trained soldier who can simply kidnap a person, so he just runs Rashid over with his car and stuffs him in the crate, all in broad daylight. Two police officers who notice the group are happy to look the other way once someone taps their debit card on the payment terminal. And no one besides Hamid is fully convinced of the perpetrator’s identity, especially when considering the fact that his wife is about to go to the hospital to give birth. Do they have the heart to kill someone so close to their child’s birth? Like Heath Ledger’s Joker, they’re dogs chasing cars, not knowing what to do once they finally catch it.

The seriousness of this very real situation is never lost sight of, as many of the practical and ethical questions largely remain unanswered. An absolutely gripping long take near the end solidifies the rage that is not only felt by the characters but also by the millions of people who are entombed within this system of oppression. At the conclusion of the standing ovation to the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Palme d’Or, Panahi expressed the guilt that he felt for being so lucky to receive acclaim and joy, all while many of his contemporaries are still under persecution. It takes faith to move mountains, and It Was Just an Accident might be the biggest piece of evidence for why we should still hold on to faith, believing that better times are on the horizon.