It Was Just an Accident

Name: It Was Just an Accident
Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller, Crime, Documentary
Released: October 15, 2025
Duration: 101 min
Rating: 91

2025

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Universal acclaim based on 41 Critic Reviews

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Movie Details & Credits

Neon | Release Date: October 15, 2025 | Not Rated

Summary: What begins as a minor accident sets in motion a series of escalating consequences.

Genre(s): Action, Adventure, Thriller, Crime, Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 101 min

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Metascore

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Critic Reviews

100

Mark Kennedy

Oct 15, 2025

Watch it and it will linger in your mind. It’s a movie for Iranians, of course, but it’s valuable for any society hoping to one day mend a divided country. Read full review

100

Karen Gordon

Oct 23, 2025

It’s one of the year’s best. Built around a moral question, the film is complex, intelligent, and relatable. Read full review

100

The Independent Clarisse Loughrey

Dec 5, 2025

It’s a film of overwhelmingly visceral emotion; impossible, then, to separate from what we imagine Panahi must feel himself. And yet, so often, we’ll see characters clamber over each other and wheel around their limbs like they’re in a Buster Keaton comedy. Read full review

Tim Grierson

Oct 17, 2025

If It Was Just an Accident lacks the conceptual audacity of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film or 2022’s No Bears, the film’s straightforward narrative proves to be just another feint, disguising the writer-director’s anger and sorrow at his own mistreatment and that of so many Iranians Read full review

Richard Whittaker

Oct 29, 2025

The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public. Read full review

The Telegraph Tim Robey

Dec 12, 2025

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair. Read full review

IONCINEMA.com Nicholas Bell

Oct 16, 2025

In many of Panahi’s past films, along with many Iranian artists working within the confines of a brutal regime, his cinema has been coded and metaphorical (though clearly not enough to avoid extreme censure). But this time, there’s no doubt with this explicit critique, which utilizes a familiar narrative formula but has the potency of a poison pen letter aimed to slash through the debilitating censorship demanded of auteurs expected to exist as prisms of propaganda. Read full review

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