All movies come from an obviously personal place like Jafar Panahi’s new film It Was Just An Accident. Jafar Panahi, like many, suffered through Iran’s prison system, probably making him wonder about some plausible scenarios. He may meet one of the men who tortured him, which is what happens to Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mechanic. Vahid runs into Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), convinced that he’s prison torturer ‘Peg Leg’ and knocks him out. He drags Eghbal out in the desert but the latter plants seed of doubt in his mind. Because of this, he tracks down his fellow former prisoners to confirm that Eghbal is Peg Leg.

I’ve seen my share of Iranian films but as a Westerner it’s easy to lump them together. It’s easy to see the similarities between this new Panahi film and fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Both, in fairness, have traces of car cinema and Looney Tunes style gallows humour as their connective tissue. Panahi, though, employs meta fiction more although this new film feels like, complimentary, his most scripted. The straightforward approach works in displaying characters’ trauma, specifically Vahid’s fellow ex-incarcerees like photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari). “He stinks of sweat like him” is a bar, one of many in It Was Just An Accident.

This film doesn’t just show trauma through words – it also displays it through physicality. Sometimes it appears in Shiva’s face or when Vahid’s back gives out in this very stressful day. Panahi’s characters are usually lone rangers, with a few exceptions like Offside from 2006. Having a few characters on screen in It Was Just An Accident allows from some obvious interpersonal interactions. These characters know of each other for varying amounts of time which means some will have some paranoiac flashes. But the film knows when to reel itself into its moral quandary of how to deal with enemies, perhaps through violence. An aside here, I love how every character can just lie unprompted, even Eghbal’s daughter Niloufar (Delmaz Najafi). As Princess Poppy from Rupaul’s Drag Race once said, let people lie.

Panahi works with different frequencies in It Was Just An Accident, starting with deliberate pacing. Its middle section has characters mostly agreeing that Eghbal and Peg Leg are the same person and want their revenge. These include Golrokh and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), a couple, and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). The film eventually get those three people out of the way, leaving Shiva and Vahid. Keeping the two of them is a good decision in a film where characters can surprise us with how they’ll eventually act. The film ebbs and flows with silence and anger as characters change and break.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t write about It Was Just An Accident without discussing recent events. Conservative Americans have been frothing at the mouth of the idea of bombing Iran, promising regime change. Americans and Israelis are killing Iranian girls instead of freeing the people who are in Iran’s prisons. While watching films like this one needs to keep wishing for an Iran that determines its own fate. Another sad thing about this film is that despite Iranian culture and pathos being mostly uniquely untranslatable, an American remake of this is depressingly possible. I already have a nightmare cast in mind.

It Was Just An Accident, a two time Oscar nominee, is available to stream on MUBI, which-