between Dante’s inferno and a road movie with victims and executioner

The most recent work of the Iranian master Jafar Panahi, winner of the Palme d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival, confirms that cinema can be an act of resistance, even when its forms are as austere as a road trip and its tone oscillates between tragedy, satire and absurdity. A simple accident is presented as a minimal story – the title announces it with irony – but behind its apparent simplicity lies a fierce allegory about guilt, justice and the impossibility of forgiveness in a country fractured by repression.

We are facing a political and existential parable, a film as contained in its gestures as it is fierce in its message. Panahi exhibits an uncomfortable mirror where the cracks of contemporary morality are reflected. Simple in its premise but dazzling in its execution, a “simple accident” is a collective and universal tragedy.

From his first shot, Panahi makes it clear that we are dealing with something more than a linear story. The film begins in the middle of the night, with an accidental run over by a dog: a scene as banal as it is symbolic, which introduces the central motif of chance as the trigger for the disaster. From that small incident, a chain reaction of moral and political consequences is unleashed, which leads a group of characters towards a common destiny inside a dilapidated van. In that small—and metaphorical—space, the tensions of an entire nation are concentrated.

The film can be read as a kind of “Waiting for Godot” filmed on wheels. The reference to Samuel Beckett, because Panahi seems to dialogue directly with the theater of the absurd: his characters are trapped in an endless wait, incapable of making decisions, victims of their own confusion and of a system that has condemned them to immobility. “Do we expect justice or do we expect oblivion?” one of them asks, summarizing the ethical dilemma that runs through the entire work.

In this journey through dusty roads and desolate towns, Panahi turns the road movie into a moral battlefield. What begins as a routine journey transforms into an odyssey in which each stop reveals a new social wound. The occupants of the van—a mother, a student, a former political prisoner, a girl, and the driver who acts as executioner—represent the different faces of contemporary Iran: victims and perpetrators united by the same trauma. The forced coexistence between them is, at the same time, a metaphor for the entire country, confined in its own ideological vehicle, without a clear direction and with the fuel of revenge running out. Panahi avoids the pamphlet and prefers the contained tension of the psychological thriller to the frontal denunciation. Its staging, sober and precise, relies on silences, reflections and glances to build a story in which each gesture has political weight.

There is something almost documentary in its approach, but also a careful aesthetic elaboration: the framing of a bandaged face, fixed and silent, is enough to condense an entire national history of humiliation and resistance. In that motionless face—a shot that could last minutes—Panahi demonstrates his formal mastery. The character’s blindfolded eye not only suggests the blindness of power or the helplessness of the victims: it also reflects the collective inability to see the other without hatred. The camera does not judge, it observes; and in that observation the true criticism emerges. The director trusts in the intelligence of the viewer, who must read between the lines of the repressed pain of a society where speaking is still an act of bravery.

The climax of A Simple Accident is one of the most chilling moments in recent cinema. Panahi, true to his style, uses off-screen as a narrative and moral weapon. It does not show violence: it suggests it, it lets it resonate in the subsequent silence, in the faces that we cannot see. This ellipsis has a devastating effect, because it forces the imagination to take the place of the executioner.

It is a resource that is reminiscent of both the poetic realism of Taxi Teherán (2015) and the political symbolism of Three Faces (2018), but taken here to an extreme of unprecedented crudeness. The film is harsh, but it does not renounce compassion. Panahi grants his characters the possibility—albeit minimal—of forgiveness. In that sense, A Simple Accident is not only a plea against repression, but also a tribute to the humanity of those who, even on the brink of the abyss, preserve a remnant of piety. The problem, the director seems to warn, is that such pity rarely serves to stop the cycle of hate.

The denouement functions as a disturbing and circular moral trap. The camera returns to the same starting point, to the place of the initial attack, closing a Dantesque circle that recalls the seventh circle of hell described by Dante: that of the violent, condemned to an eternity of fire and blood. Panahi seems to tell us that Iranian society—and perhaps any society—is trapped in its own hell of perverse symmetries, where the executioner and the victim end up sharing the same fate.