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Frankly, you can make an entire Best Picture category at the 2026 Oscars just by pulling from this year's international releases, from "The Secret Agent" to "Sirât" to "Sentimental Value." In fact, one of this writer's favorite films of the past year, full stop, was a foreign wonder: Jafar Panahi's tense Iranian thriller "It Was Just an Accident," which claimed the prestigious Palme d'Or prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
Though "Accident" fared far better at the 2026 Golden Globes, where it was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language as well as well as Best Director and Best Screenplay for Panahi, it did get some love among this year's Academy Award nominees: It's up for Best International Feature Film and Best Screenplay. However, the chilling drama was undeservedly snubbed in the Best Picture category, and Panahi was nowhere to be found among the Best Director cohorts.
Article continues belowWhat is 'It Was Just an Accident' about?
As teased, the film begins with an accident. When a man with a prosthetic leg (played by Ebrahim Azizi) brings in his damaged vehicle to a local auto shop, the shop's Azerbaijani mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), believes he recognizes the customer as his former sadistic jailhouse captor, from when he and others were being held captive in an Iranian prison.
Vahid kidnaps the man, with plans to bury him in the desert, but first he wants confirmation of the man's identity, so he seeks out his fellow survivors — including wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari) and soon-to-be newlyweds Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi) — to see if they recognize the sound and smell of their presumed tormentor, given that they were blindfolded during the torture and interrogations.
As the motley crew travels throughout Tehran, they confront the moral quandaries of whether revenge against their captor is justified or whether they're merely adding more bloodshed to the never-ending nature of violence.
Why you should you stream 'It Was Just an Accident' on Hulu
Both onscreen and off, Jafar Panahi's "It Was Just an Accident" is an act of resistance against an oppressive Iranian regime — the filmmaker himself is a former political prisoner, having regular run-ins with the Iranian government over the years due to the subversive and critical nature of his work, the most recent being a one-year prison sentence in Iran, handed down in absentia in December 2025 for “propaganda activities against the regime.”
Those personal stakes ramp up not only the searing, slow-burn tension of Panahi's film but also give it its emotional core. The characters' van-cruising hijinks are fueled by a sense of justice, sure, but also the intense psychological weight of their personal trauma. It's "perhaps the most bluntly political film by Jafar Panahi yet," as reads the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes — where the acclaimed thriller has an excellent 98% approval rating — but it's also arguably the director's most human project to date, one where the choice of whether to kill a tormentor or spare him isn't just a rebuke of authoritarianism but a rumination on whether it's even up to us to decide who deserves mercy and morality in the first place.
And no spoilers, but the final moments were more terrifying than any horror movie I've seen in the past 12 months. Buckle up!
Watch "It Was Just an Accident" on Hulu now
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