It Was Just An Accident

The most radical revolution is the one that restores to the individual the ability to answer for their own actions.
— Hannah Arendt

In Panahi’s world, film is not only narrative but an inquiry into freedom, power, and personal responsibility in the face of the established order. It Was Just an Accident rests on an underground tension between what appears as chance and what reveals itself as a chosen—or perhaps imposed—destiny.
The opening scene takes on the value of a paradigm: hitting the animal—an innocent victim—is not a mere accident, but the opening of a chain of events that involves structures of domination, memory, the marked body, and conscience. The wife who says “It was God’s will” embodies passivity, the abdication of responsibility: if everything is willed by God, then I must not ask, must not assume the outcome. The daughter’s retort—“God has nothing to do with it”—highlights the clash between religious determinism and human agency. In this exchange, the film invites us to reflect: it is not the apparatus or divine will that decides, but we—through our daily gestures—who trace the line of responsibility.

The mechanic Vahid is the face of memory that refuses neutrality. The regime has tortured and scarred him, and now that mechanical gesture—recognizing the movement of the leg, listening to the sound of the prosthesis—becomes a call to action. Yet the action is not immediately heroic: it is charged with ambiguity, with the possibility of error, of potential guilt. This is the great gift of the film: it shows how resistance, justice, and persecution are not linear, but suffused with responsibility, self-responsibility. No one can offload it onto the dominant order, divine will, or accidental mistake. The protagonist must decide, must question himself, must assume.

Thus the final scene explodes as a symbolic moment of impossible reconciliation and a summons to responsibility. A woman who has lived through her own atrocity slaps her torturer—not as a sanctified heroine, but as a figure embodying the refusal of impunity, the refusal of neutrality. The torturer, who until that moment had evaded the truth, is forced—aloud—to say what he is. The radical word tears through the lie, returns to the torturer his identity, and simultaneously restores to the tortured their own power. In that gesture lies the understanding that responsibility belongs not only to the one who commits the act, but also to the one who observes, who remains silent, who lets things happen. The social order endures only if it is not interrupted by individual truth.

Ultimately, It Was Just an Accident is a film that rejects resignation. The architecture of power represses, tortures, annihilates—but responsibility, the authentic kind, remains in the individual’s choice to act, to not flee, to not surrender to divine will. It is a film that unites the grammar of the thriller (the mechanic, the ambush, the abduction) with the existential lexicon of living in a society of oppression. And it reminds us that the “accident”—that run-over dog, that gesture that seems small—can be the beginning of an inner revolution.
What emerges is a cinema of responsibility, of memory, of existential commitment. A cinema that, while rooted in a concrete political reality (Iranian repression), rises to a universal portrait: each of us may be an actor of silences, of unspoken accusations, and has the possibility to break the invisible weave of domination—or at least to try, without denial.
In this sense, Panahi offers not an interpretation but a sign—a hammer’s gentleness—that one becomes complicit by remaining a spectator. He asks us: what will you do, now that the leg has made that sound you recognize? The sound echoes in the finale so as not to be ignored.

We are condemned to be free: once thrown into the world, we are responsible for everything we do.
— Jean-Paul Sartre