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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