There has been much comparison of Yorgos Lathimos Bugonia to the Palm D’or winning film of the 2025 Cannes film festival It Was Just an Accident. After all, the two films share the central topic of conspiracy and accusation of powerful elites, particularly by working class people who are left in the wake of their wandering. Each film involves kidnapping, accusation, and investigation into people that dwell in ivory towers and make decisions that greatly alter the lives of people living life on the ground floor.

It Was Just an Accident is not centered on an alien invasion though, while there is comedy it’s not quite to the absurdist levels that Bugonia sustains. Moreover it’s a drama focused around a family man who is accused by an auto mechanic of torturing him in Iranian prison years prior. Eqbal (Ebrahim Azizi) comes to get his car repaired with his wife and daughter and Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) recognizes his voice, and more importantly the sound of his prosthetic leg squeaking as he ambles around the garage. Before we are told his motivation, without explanation Vahid follows Eqbal home, and tracks him through town, knocking him out and taking him to a desert where he accuses him of the war crimes that were brought down upon him. Eqbal rejects these accusations, insisting Vahid has the wrong man. Frustrated, Vahid goes around asking his friends and former comrades to help identify Eqbal as the perpetrator of their years of torture.

He enlists Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer, Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), an engaged couple, and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) a former partner of Shiva’s to help identify the unconscious man in the back of Vahid’s van. Each of them seem to believe this is the man who is responsible for their suffering, but each is unsure enough to not make the final decision and bury him alive in the desert. Much of the film is arguing about the choice to stoop to the levels of the monsters that tortured them for years. Amongst these moral dilemmas the comedy of having an unconscious man in your van as they drive around Tehran is played to an almost Weekend at Bernie’s effect. Running into security guards on top of a parking structure, or having the van driven off by what appears to be a thief all play against the tension of the premise.

For a Palm D’or winner and an Iranian film, It Was Just an Accident is fairly zippy. It’s somewhat silly, fast paced, has a tight 104 minute runtime. It watches like a heist movie, but instead of robbing a casino Danny Ocean has to figure out if a man deserves to be killed. Even the gang of conspirators feels like assembling a team. The team itself doesn’t exactly have a specific set of skills, but they each have a moment in the film to fill themselves in, making their choices up to that point and after mesh with their character. It’s interesting and ironic that twice now Cannes has awarded a kidnapping gone wrong movie it’s highest award, after Anora won last year.

But the beating heart of the movie is the empathy each one of the people looking for revenge against the crimes against them show in their moralistic struggles. Even if they can successfully identify this man as the monster they believe him to be, are they capable of the horrors that they need to be in order to exact revenge? And do they want to be capable of such things? Vahid and Shiva in particular wear their struggles on their sleeves. Vahid is the first one to show this weakness, by himself, shortly after the kidnapping. He claims it’s because he wasn’t sure this was the man who tortured him, but a part of him doubts whether he can bury a man alive.

The ending of the film in particular is a shining moment. It is at once a question mark, and a statement. Letting you decide what happens the second the credits start rolling. Does forgiveness truly exist? Does anyone truly deserve it? Does it defeat the point of forgiveness to only grant it to those that deserve it? Will there be ruinous reactions to the action of taking the high road? It Was Just an Accident brings all those thoughts to the forefront, and makes the audience answer them within themselves.

5/5