It’s a suitably arresting set-up for Jafar Panahi’s politically charged and darkly hilarious abduction movie – especially when it becomes clear what’s going on: impulsive mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes he’s caught the brutal interrogator who once tortured him for three months and left him scarred – a man given the epithets ‘Peg Leg’ and ‘the Gimp’ by his victims. The guy in cuffs has a prosthetic leg, just like the Gimp, who lost his fighting in Syria. It scans.
But like so much else in this blackly brilliant film, a question mark hangs over this Blood Simple-style scenario. Is this man, played by Ebrahim Azizi, really the author of his suffering or is he just a family man called Eghbal, as he claims? All the Gimp’s victims were blindfolded, so how can anyone be sure?
Panahi is a formidably courageous filmmaker who has spent time in jail at the hands of his country’s repressive regime. Here, he brings deep feeling to a movie that often plays closer to a straight comedy than a fiercer indictment of the state or a Munich-like morality tale about justice and vengeance.
You can definitely sense the directorial wish-fulfilment in the carnivalesque that follows as Vahid drags the drugged Eghbal around Tehran in his beat-up transit van, gathering a small band of fellow victims to help him identify the man and decide what to do with him. Joining this increasingly hapless quest are wedding snapper Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a soon-to-be newlywed couple (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), and the relentlessly impulsive Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). All have traumatic personal connects to the torturer.
Farhadi has a whale of a time taking the piss out of his country’s corruption
The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country. One police officer even fishes out a card reader to take a bribe when the gang don’t have cash to hand to get out of a tight spot.
Panahi holds this tonal range expertly as laughs give away to a probing, philosophical third act that upends expectations in quietly thrilling style.
And there’s deep seriousness, and a streak of real darkness, beneath the big laughs. The fact that a soon-to-be-married couple, dressed in their wedding finery for a photoshoot that Vahid has interrupted, join the revenge mission is not just the punchline for some great jokes, it feels symbolic too. A Simple Accident is a journey through a county whose trauma still needs healing before healthy new bonds can begin to form. The question of how to achieve that lies at the heart of this masterful movie.
In US theaters Oct 15.