It Was Just an Accident
Neon | Release Date: October 15, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
39
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyDec 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
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsDec 5, 2025
It’s a beautifully written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeDec 4, 2025
The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films. Read full review
100
Washington PostJanice PageOct 30, 2025
It Was Just an Accident ends twice. Both times, its brilliance can take your breath away. That is, what breath you have left by the third and fourth acts of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s latest relentless road trip, wherein the destination isn’t a place or a thing, but a masterful commentary on power. Read full review
100
The New YorkerJustin ChangOct 24, 2025
It is, bluntly and unabashedly, rip-roaring entertainment, propelled by flurries of comedy, bursts of emotion, and sidelong jolts of social critique. Read full review
100
Original-CinKaren GordonOct 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
ObserverOliver JonesOct 21, 2025
Panahi has crafted a moral quandary fit for Plato; yet unlike his past works—including 2022’s No Bears and 2018’s 3 Faces (both of which, like this film, were filmed without permission in Iran)—there’s nothing theoretical or metaphoric on display here. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriOct 20, 2025
It Was Just an Accident plays like an ideal melding of the filmmaker Panahi was and the filmmaker he’s been forced to become. It’s an endlessly fascinating and extraordinarily powerful work. Read full review
100
The Travers TakePeter TraversOct 17, 2025
In Jafar Panahi’s latest masterpiece, one of the very best movies of the year, five Iranian dissidents debate killing their former torturer. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesOct 16, 2025
The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime. Read full review
100
The Associated PressMark KennedyOct 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
The New York TimesManohla DargisOct 15, 2025
It’s a cry from the heart, a comic howl in the dark and one of the year’s essential movies. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comRobert DanielsSep 2, 2025
Through cinematographer Amin Jafari’s sense of environment, the script’s agile tonal changes, and the attentive cast, we are enthralled from minute one until the end of an intense thriller that operates quietly but with no less punch. Read full review
100
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossMay 22, 2025
This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it. Such anger is a long river that bifurcates into two opposing forces: violence and empathy. Read full review
100
The Film StageLeonardo GoiMay 22, 2025
Panahi welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, his latest also serves as a superb thriller. It is a towering achievement. Read full review
100
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 22, 2025
The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country. Read full review
92
TheWrapSteve PondMay 21, 2025
The bracing thing about It Was Just an Accident is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubNatalia KeoganSep 11, 2025
By narrativizing the collective mistreatment of political dissidents—both those he personally forged bonds with and the countless others persecuted by the Iranian state—the fearless filmmaker crafts his most radical condemnation of the forces that have long attempted to silence him. Read full review
90
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 23, 2025
The film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzOct 21, 2025
A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesTim GriersonOct 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
90
Rolling StoneDavid FearOct 16, 2025
It’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 10, 2025
Both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama, rife with tensions between justice and vengeance, healing and suffering, and reality and fantasy. Read full review
90
ColliderRoss BonaimeSep 6, 2025
A tremendous work from Jafar Panahi that might go down as his masterpiece. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerMay 21, 2025
Panahi’s latest feature is a straightforward 24-hour narrative staged with his usual attention to realistic detail, and backed by a terrific ensemble cast. Subtly plotted like a good thriller, the movie slowly but surely builds into a stark condemnation of abusive power and its long-lasting effects. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerOct 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
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenNov 11, 2025
Despite the casual quality of its title, It Was Just an Accident—the latest film from dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi—carries serious moral weight. Read full review
88
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiOct 2, 2025
Panahi is keenly aware of his limitations — both governmental and budgetary — and has crafted a taut, intimate and blood-pumping story around them. Talk about great art being born out of impossible circumstances. Read full review
86
Paste MagazineRory DohertyOct 14, 2025
The story unravels at a steady clip, inviting more voices and frenetic emotions with every furtive location change, the possibility of righteous violence looking more likely and less inevitable at any given moment. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 21, 2025
Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyDec 12, 2025
The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair. Read full review
80
The RevealKeith PhippsOct 17, 2025
It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny. Read full review
80
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannMay 30, 2025
It’s a stunning achievement from the director, one that has sat with me since I saw it, growing in its effectiveness. Read full review
80
BBCNicholas BarberMay 22, 2025
It Was Just an Accident is a taut and twisting revenge thriller loaded with heavyweight ethical quandaries. It is heartbreakingly explicit about what the well-drawn characters have suffered, but it asks whether they can ever be justified in using the same methods – abduction, torture – as their oppressors. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 21, 2025
While the simple premise recalls certain post-WWII dramas in which survivors recognize the Nazi culprits who once terrorized them, the film’s chilling last scene feels like a call to action. Read full review
80
Screen DailyWendy IdeMay 21, 2025
There’s a seam of pitch black gallows humour running through the picture, and moments of absurdist hilarity. But mostly, it’s an impassioned and forthright condemnation of the regime and of the men who do its bidding. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 21, 2025
It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonOct 30, 2025
I found it too repetitious at times, and Hamid’s constant raving, though understandable, wore thin. Despite those flaws, this is still a good film — and an important one worth seeing. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineMark HansonSep 4, 2025
The film is astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that that result from living in a state of tyranny. Read full review
60
The TimesEd PottonDec 12, 2025
The screaming and shouting eventually detract from the drama, although perhaps Panahi is making a point about the hysteria of Iran’s rulers. He is certainly making a point about the traumatising effects of their cruelty, with which he is intimately familiar. Read full review
60
IONCINEMA.comNicholas BellOct 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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