→ February 20, 2026
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It Was Just An Accident.

Part psychological thriller, part political satire, but entirely human at its core, It Was Just An Accident is the latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, who has continued to make movies despite decades of conflict with the Iranian dictatorship, which extended to a conviction and prison sentence in absentia just last December. The movie won this year’s Palme d’Or and landed nominations for Best Non-English Language/International Film at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and, like several of his prior films, was made without the permission of the theocrats in Tehran. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

It Was Just An Accident begins with a coincidence: a man is driving home at night on an unlit road with his wife and daughter in the car when he hits an animal, probably a dog, and damages the car. He pulls into the first garage he finds, where a mechanic, Vahid, recognizes the man as his torturer from an Iranian prison. He never saw the man’s face, but knows the squeaking sound of the man’s prosthetic leg. He follows them home, returns the next day, knocks the man out, and kidnaps him, nearly killing him before the man pleads that Vahid is mistaken. Vahid then contacts other former prisoners to see if they can confirm that the man is indeed their captor, Eqbal, also known as Peg Leg, leading to a very darkly comic sequence of events that has six people traveling around in a van, arguing about what to do with the guy who might have destroyed all of their lives.

The plot is secondary to the dialogue and the gamut of emotions it reveals; each of the four former prisoners has a different perspective on how to handle maybe-Eqbal, from the volatile Hamid, who just wants to kill the guy, to the more measured Shiva, who is just as angry as the rest of them but seems to understand that his death won’t solve anything. Instead, the story is the canvas on which Panahi can paint his characters, with enough narrative greed to keep up the pace during the stretches where the characters are just driving around and talking.

For most of its running time, It Was Just An Accident is close to perfect, maintaining an ideal level of tension, including the core mystery of whether the guy is actually Peg Leg, while allowing each of the characters to expostulate with the others enough to give the audience a sense of how the government’s persecution of its enemies has infected all of Iranian society. These four survivors are not visibly wounded; the irony is that the only injured person in the van is the suspected torturer, not his victims. Yet they are all scarred from their experiences in prison, where they were thrown after protesting against economic hardships – another coincidence, as the country is currently engulfed in similar protests, with prices rising and the Iranian rial crashing to record lows. How can they simply go about their lives after the trauma they endured, and now with the added knowledge that the man who tortured them, threatened to kill them, may have even raped one of them, is walking around scot-free?

The movie doesn’t quite stick its landing, unfortunately, as another coincidence of sorts, or at least an unrelated event, crops up that forces the motley crew to make some sort of decision, although it does also allow Panahi to further demonstrate the deep humanity of these people and further contrast them to the regime that would imprison or kill them on the slightest pretense. Once that’s resolved, we get to the climax, with its Shakespearean tone and series of monologues, before a brief final scene that recalls the perfection of the earlier parts of the film.

I’ve only seen three of the Best Picture nominees so far, but I’d put this over Train Dreams and behind Sinners and One Battle After Another. It’s unlikely to win for Best International Feature, as two of its competitors, Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, scored Best Picture nods, but I wonder if it has a slight chance in its other category, Best Original Screenplay, which seems to be a way to honor a film that’s not going to win anything else, at least about half the time in recent years.

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→ February 24, 2025
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Shot in secret in 2022-23, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was banned in Iran and its release abroad led to arrest warrants for the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after which he and most members of the cast fled the country. It’s a nearly three-hour epic film that starts out as a political drama, morphs into a sort of psychological thriller, and ends up as almost an action film, as we follow a single family during the 2022-23 protests against the theocratic regime, unrest that takes this apparently quiet household and shatters its peace and the fragile mind of its patriarch.

Iman was a low-level investigator for the Islamic dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, and as the film begins he’s been promoted to a more senior investigative role, one that will pay better, grant him better housing, and that also gives him a gun, invoking Chekhov’s rule. His family doesn’t know what he does for work at first, but he tells his wife Najmeh, and the two of them then have to explain to their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, that they must be particularly rigid about following the laws, including wearing the hijab (which was at the root of the protests) and avoiding posting pictures of themselves on social media. Rezvan’s friend ends up injured by the police while the two are leaving a university building, and Najmeh helps patch the friend up briefly while getting her out of the house before Iman knows she’s been there, but this is just the undercard for what’s to come: The gun goes missing, and Iman assumes the culprit is in the house. That shifts the entire tenor of the movie to one that looked outward to the brutal police response to the protestors into one that looks inward at how Iman’s new job, where he is rubber-stamping dozens if not hundreds of executions per day, has warped his inner self and made him into a tyrant who will gladly repress the women under his command at the slightest provocation.

The fact that it was filmed in secret only underscores the movie’s broader themes of how authoritarian regimes destroy the fundamental bonds that hold us together, with family above all: They turn neighbors against neighbors and family members against family members. Iman has no reason to distrust or suspect his compliant wife or his daughters of anything until the government sends him home with a metaphor. He and his wife are both true believers in the regime and in their Islamic faith, while their daughters, who have access to social media and can see that the government is lying to them, want the same kind of freedoms that the protestors are fighting for. The conflict in their home mirrors the conflict in Iranian society, and when Iman goes around the bend and begins terrorizing his family after their address and his picture appear online, he resorts to increasingly harsh and inhumane tactics to force their obedience, with somewhat predictable consequences for everyone. The final moment and image are further loaded with symbolism, as the hollow foundation beneath one character’s feet gives way, arguing just how tenuous the power of a dictatorship truly is.

This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen from 2024, even if it drags a little in the final third, as Rasoulof seems less adept at managing the action sequences than he is at the psychological thiller bits; there’s a long section where several characters are chasing each other through some ruins, but you could easily put the Benny Hill music over it and it would work just fine. The shift from the macro lens to the micro one is just brilliant, as the script sets up the context with real footage from the protests, making especial note of just how much the violence came down against women (in a country that already is one of the most repressive in the world when it comes to women’s rights), before moving to the family drama, where it becomes increasingly clear that these three women are just serfs who exist at the whim of their father. It’s a brutal and unstinting look at Iranian society; no wonder the authoritarian clerics didn’t like it.

(I don’t think this film has a chance at the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year, for which it’s one of the five nominees, as I’m Still Here is also in that category and has a Best Picture nod as well, which probably means it will end up taking the spot everyone assumed would go to Emilia Perez before that film’s implosion in the last few weeks.)

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→ April 10, 2023
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Holy Spider.

In 2000-01, a seemingly ordinary man in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad began killing sex workers, claiming he was doing his religious duty to “cleanse” the streets of “corrupt women,” with 16 victims before he was caught and executed. Holy Spider takes the story of Saeed Hanaei, a builder, Iran-Iraq war veteran, husband, and father of three who was also a serial killer, and retells it via a fictional journalist character, Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to write about the killings, only to find the authorities disinterested in solving it because they tacitly support what he’s doing. (It’s on Netflix, or you can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc..)

Holy Spider is entirely in Farsi, and was Denmark’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, as the Iranian filmmaker, Ali Abbasi, lives in Copenhagen. Much of what happens with Hanaei is drawn from reality – he lured sex workers, many of whom were drug addicts as well, back to his apartment, gave them a little money, and then would strangle them with their own headscarves. The Iranian press at the time nicknamed him the “Spider Killer,” and some even questioned whether his murders were even a crime, given the victims; wasn’t Hanaei just cleaning up the streets?

Rahimi arrives in Mashhad and immediately finds that the men are being … well, men. The best among them, such as the local reporter whom Hanaei calls sometimes to tell him where he left his latest victim’s body, is benevolently sexist towards her, trying to deter her from investigating the killings at all and constantly telling her not to go to certain areas or run down certain leads because it’s all so dangerous for a lady person. Others interfere more directly, or lie to her, or threaten her, or in one case assault her. As Hanaei keeps killing and the police seem to do nothing, Rahimi begins to investigate more directly, putting herself in Hanaei’s sights, but also creating the best chance for the police to catch him.

Holy Spider tries to be both a thriller and an exploration of cultural misogyny, but isn’t quite deft enough to do both, so once the thriller part is largely resolved with Hanaei’s arrest, the film finally gets to be one thing, and does it well. There’s no real mystery to Holy Spider – even if you didn’t know the original story, the first thing we see is Hanaei committing one of the murders. The film gains some tension from the knowledge that the longer it takes for anyone to figure out what’s going on, the more women will die, and from the unspoken conflict between Rahimi and pretty much everyone she encounters as she tries to cover the story or find the killer herself. Once he’s arrested, after the film’s most intense scene, the focus can be entirely on the way Iranian society, from the police and the religious authorities down to the people they’ve indoctrinated, devalues women. Hanaei even becomes a sort of folk hero to some Iranians. One victim had a child; another was pregnant when killed. Rahimi and her reporter ally even interview one victim’s parents, only to find the mother say she’s glad her daughter is dead rather than still engaging in sex work and using opiates. A woman’s life is simply not worth as much as a man’s to this society. Or this one, for that matter.

The unevenness of Holy Spider crosses into some of the direction and editing as well. The film lingers too long on the murders, coming across as lurid rather than shocking – it does nothing to humanize the victims, each of whom gets a sliver of a character before their on-screen deaths. Focusing on his face during a killing ends up giving him more screen time than the character deserves, time that could have gone to exploring more about the women he was murdering. The ending, after Saeed’s execution, is also very on-the-nose and could have gotten its point, that Saeed’s internalized misogyny and religious zealotry are cultural phenomena rather than just his individual madness, across in less than half the time.

Holy Spider still works, with flaws. It’s buoyed by a great lead performance by the exiled Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi (profiled here last fall), who lost her career to the entrenched misogyny of Iranian society; and a strong supporting performance by Mehdi Bajestani as Saeed. Ebrahimi’s performance successfully threads the needle between making Rahimi seem to weak and making her seem implausibly strong or confident; an early scene, where she’s checking into a hotel and they try to turn her away because she’s a woman traveling alone, establishes her toughness while also setting the scene for the various indignities to come. Had the film chosen just to focus on her character, even though she’s entirely fictional, it might have been even stronger in the end.

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→ July 20, 2017
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The Salesman.

The Salesman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this past February, although the film’s victory was obscured by director Asghar Farhadi’s refusal to travel to the ceremony after the current Administration attempted to enact a de facto travel ban on people from his native Iran, among other countries. The ban and the director’s previous, eloquent statements criticizing it may have secured the win for the film, especially given the overall tone of the proceedings this year. Separating the movie from the atmosphere around it (as best as I can), however, the story and the two lead performances are more than deserving, and, as with his Oscar-winning A Separation, Farhadi has shown how much a strong screenwriter can do without resorting to the usual pandering of sex and violence. (The film is available on Amazon Prime, or for rent on iTunes.)

The movie’s title comes from the play within the film: A married couple, Rana and Emad, are also starring in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with Emad as the protagonist Willy Loman and Rana as his wife, both wearing prosthetics and using makeup to appear much older than they are. The movie opens as the couple’s apartment building is evacuated as the structure begins to crack due to construction in the neighboring empty lot, putting the edifice at risk of collapse. One of their co-stars in the play has a vacant apartment in his building and offers it to the couple rent-free, but doesn’t fully explain why the previous resident left or why all of her stuff is still sitting in one locked room. Someone visits the apartment, apparently thinking the previous tenant is still there, and ends up assaulting Rana, putting her in the hospital with a skull injury and possible concussion. The aftermath of the assault drives a wedge between her and her husband, as she suffers obvious PTSD and doesn’t want to pursue a case against her unknown assailant while Emad struggles to understand why she can’t just ‘get over it’ yet simultaneously becomes fixated on finding the culprit and enacting vengeance.

Farhadi thrives on delicate pacing and dialogue that leaves much unsaid, which can be more powerful in the right hands but puts a great burden on the actors. Taraneh Alidoosti delivers one of the best performances of the year as Rana, going from the confident, matter-of-fact woman from before the attack to a woman showing all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, looking for emotional support her husband can’t give her, still trying to act in the play as it’s the one ‘normal’ thing she might be able to do. Shahab Hosseini is a bit maddening as Emad because he’s so perfectly aloof, unable to see past his own anger to help his wife, obsessing over finding the perpetrator – only to stumble on an answer he didn’t expect. And when that character is revealed in a tragicomic parallel to the play, Emad and Rana end up opposing each other over what to do about him: whether to grant him forgiveness or ruin his life by telling his family what he’s done.

The Salesman establishes its velocity early and never wavers from it; Farhadi doesn’t speed things up as we approach the resolution, and there’s no fake action to give the film a burst of energy. It’s a slow build, such that the tension near the end and the sense that something awful is going to happen is close to unbearable, after which Farhadi leaves the audience with an ambiguous closing scene (like that of A Separation) that leaves many aspects of the story open to interpretation. The story seems like it would demand an easy answer or a big finish, but even its most basic questions, like whether or how to forgive someone who committed a crime like the one depicted here, remain unresolved. His depiction of the attacker introduces an element of uncertainty that, at the very least, raises the possibility of empathy rather than justifying the initial reaction of one of the neighbors that he’d like to skin the culprit alive.

I’ve seen all five of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film from last year – the others are Land of Mine, Tanna, Toni Erdmann, and A Man Called Ove – and would have voted for The Salesman too, giving it the edge over Tanna on story and the two lead performances. South Korea’s film board chose not to submit The Handmaiden, which I think would have at least given The Salesman a run for its money in the voting given the former’s high production values and strong LGBT storyline, although in the end the best film was the winner anyway.
 

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