You’d be right to want to exact cold revenge on a per­son who tor­tured you and plant­ed night­mare imagery of death and suf­fer­ing in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to mur­der them for the greater good, as penance for not only your own trau­ma, but for the many oth­ers who suf­fered as a result of their state-approved methods?

This is a ques­tion at the fore­front of Iran­ian film­mak­er Jafar Panahi’s mind, as he was one of those peo­ple who was arrest­ed, placed in cus­tody under spu­ri­ous charges and made to suf­fer the gross indig­ni­ties of phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture because he dared to resist the régime. His bril­liant new film, It Was Just an Acci­dent, extrap­o­lates and drama­tis­es his waver­ing, post-incar­na­tion thought pat­terns as he pon­ders the true val­ue or mor­tal revenge against his patri­ot­ic oppressors.

It starts, as so many Panahi films do, in a car, with a man dri­ving his heav­i­ly preg­nant wife and pre-teen daugh­ter through the night. They hit a stray dog and the car stalls in the mid­dle of nowhere, yet they find a kind man who offers them assis­tance in a small factory.

The car’s dri­ver has a pros­thet­ic leg and walks with a dis­tinct squeak, which is heard by and trig­gers anoth­er man on the upstairs floor named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri). He enters into a state of fren­zied shock and, when the fam­i­ly even­tu­al­ly dri­ves off, he decides to fol­low them dis­crete­ly in his mini­van. With the help of some shack­les and a shov­el, he waits for his moment and then attacks the man on the street for rea­sons that aren’t ini­tial­ly clear. He bun­dles him in the van, and then with mad-eyed des­per­a­tion he comes with­in a hair’s breadth of bury­ing his pris­on­er alive.

He firm­ly believes that the man with the squeaky limp is the feared jail­er known as ​“Peg-Leg” whose actions caused last­ing dam­age to Vahid’s body and mind, as well as count­less neg­a­tive knock-on effects in his fam­i­ly life. But at the very last sec­ond, he ques­tions whether this is in fact the right man, and his doubt fuels a road-trip around a bustling Tehran in search of cor­rob­o­ra­tors who can pos­i­tive­ly iden­ti­fy this poten­tial monster.

It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly-writ­ten and exe­cut­ed work, one of Panahi’s most for­mal­ly straight­for­ward yet pow­er­ful, grip­ping and gen­er­ous. As the clock ticks on and the van fills up with folks from all walks of life who also want their pound of flesh, the messi­ness of life makes itself felt and the sim­ple task at hand becomes more com­plex as a broad­er pic­ture of their cap­tor emerges.

Panahi has always been a philo­soph­i­cal and mag­nan­i­mous film­mak­er when it comes to ques­tions of cen­sor­ship and vio­lence, often propos­ing cre­ative and peace­able solu­tions to prob­lems that could eas­i­ly be dealt with through vio­lence. In the case of this new film, it’s brac­ing and a lit­tle bit scary to see him shift towards an ambigu­ous mid­dle ground, where whim­si­cal diplo­ma­cy may no longer be an option.

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When sad-eyed music stu­dent Lau­ra (Paula Beer) is involved in a car crash that leaves her boyfriend dead from an hor­rif­ic head injury, she shows no signs of trau­ma or grief. In fact, with the inti­ma­tion that she was plagued with inte­ri­or suf­fer­ing pri­or to the event, this moment appears to have jolt­ed her back towards some sem­blance of calm rea­son. Bet­ty (Bar­bara Auer), an old­er woman liv­ing alone in a coun­try house on a qui­et lane is the first on the scene, and comes to Laura’s aid even though she has been flung from the wreck­age with only super­fi­cial scratches.

This being a Chris­t­ian Pet­zold film, every frame comes drenched in the cool, clear waters of ambi­gu­i­ty, and even the very spe­cif­ic and strange man­ner in which the acci­dent occurs leaves it open as to whether Lau­ra her­self may have caused it in a fit of emo­tion­al piqué. She then hov­ers, ghost-like, into Betty’s house where she asks if she can stay for an unde­ter­mined amount of time. With­out hes­i­ta­tion, Bet­ty allows it, and you’re left to pon­der why she would invite a dis­com­bob­u­lat­ed stranger to nes­tle under her wing.

As usu­al, Pet­zold draws in a num­ber of artis­tic inspi­ra­tions and touch­points, then riffs around them with­out ever erring into any­thing as déclassé as homage. The title of the film is a ref­er­ence to a piece by Mau­rice Rav­el that Lau­ra is prac­tic­ing for a recital and that is heard a num­ber of times on the car radio of Betty’s son, Max (Enno Trebs), who is qui­et­ly per­turbed by her mother’s deci­sion and Laura’s pres­ence. As in the director’s pre­vi­ous films such as 2007’s Yel­la and 2014’s Phoenix, music acts less as an enhancer of mood than it does a trig­ger-point for dor­mant mem­o­ries; a hyp­not­ic tool that unlocks the enclosed recess­es of the psy­che – and that applies to both the char­ac­ters in the film and the audi­ence watching.

Anoth­er sneak­i­ly-deployed lit­er­ary allu­sion comes in the form of Mark Twain’s ​‘The Adven­tures of Tom Sawyer’, specif­i­cal­ly the fable of how Tom hood­winks his com­padres not only into paint­ing a fence for him, but pay­ing him for the plea­sure. Bet­ty is first intro­duced paint­ing the fence in her front gar­den, and she regales the sto­ry to Lau­ra when she asks if she can help. Per­haps she does so to come clean ear­ly on and admit that she may be exploit­ing her vis­i­tor for an obscure (but pos­si­bly benign) ulte­ri­or motive.

As the sto­ry of Miroirs No. 3 unfolds with an intractable and whol­ly com­pelling inter­nal log­ic, Pet­zold grav­i­tates towards a twist which is too sign­post­ed and obvi­ous to have any real bear­ing on what the film is actu­al­ly about. Instead, its ram­i­fi­ca­tions colour the intense final act in which Bet­ty and Lau­ra are giv­en time to reflect on their expe­ri­ences and work out how they will con­tin­ue to live their lives. And, more impor­tant­ly, will they learn not fall into the same traps as they did the first time around? Did this chance encounter in which the two pro­tag­o­nists are able to inhab­it the roles of emo­tion­al sur­ro­gates for each oth­er actu­al­ly pro­vide a form of per­for­ma­tive ther­a­py and con­so­la­tion? Or is Lau­ra – like in the old Otto Pre­minger movie – just a ghost­ly siren trans­fix­ing all who meet her? (Beer even looks iden­ti­cal to Gene Tier­ney, no?)

All of which is to say, no-one, absolute­ly no-one is doing it like Pet­zold. As with the tit­u­lar Rav­el piece, this is a work that is mel­liflu­ous, melo­di­ous and mys­te­ri­ous in equal mea­sure. A Sphinx-like Beer, once again, seems to con­nect with her direc­tor on a lev­el which tran­scends the pure­ly pro­fes­sion­al, and through her eco­nom­ic yet force­ful use of body lan­guage and expres­sion, she makes cer­tain that the film adheres per­fect­ly to Petzold’s immac­u­late calculations. 

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