It Was Just an Accident (2025)
I had somehow almost missed this was actually the winner last year from Cannes, as Sentimental Value has taken up much more media presence afterwards. I don’t know if it is an outright trait of Iranian cinema, but constructing a high stakes moral dilemma and let the story go from there is at least something I have seen in some fashion from Asghar Farhadi and Abbas Kiarostami. It takes a very serious issue of former torture victims and apply it with a small element of dark humor, which is rightly balanced. It doesn’t deflate the gravity of the subject matter, but the circular narrative becomes almost absurd towards the end, which for me at least made me see the film more for its symbolic concept than something that should be taken for realism as such.
The film delivers a proper sense of these peoples past trauma and why they want the resolution so badly. There inner conflict state is sitting very much on the outside of them as they allow their uncertainty and doubt to uphold their own moral codex as best they can. I didn’t feel the film forced any sort of sympathy for these people as such, but let it stay with the lack of proper catharsis or resolve throughout the whole ordeal. What failed in some aspect for me was it seems to try to want to show some ambiguity with giving sympathy for both victims and the torturers, though by the end I was left with not much empathy for either. Though I guess there is some value in that final unresolvedness and that may be the films force.
Rating: 3.5