Or a simple accident, as the title seems to more accurately translate.

I have a bit of a set against Jafar Panahi. I think it’s because the first films of his that I saw were ones where he put himself in the middle of them. Often there would be a meta take on him as a director and I know this is born from him being banned from making films for many years in Iran and having to film things in secret. I just found it a bit egocentric in a way that detracted from the stories he was telling.

I love Iranian film and so it’s a bit odd that I tend to avoid his films now. I had a ticket for No Bears as my last film at a previous festival and skipped it and have still never seen it. This time I booked a ticket to his latest film, the first he has made since the ban on his film-making was lifted, although it still needed to be made in secret without official permission. It doesn’t have him in it, so that’s a plus, and it is a relatively standard story that mixes comedy with serious themes about the totalitarian regime in Iran.

Slightly bumbling Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) one night has a neighbour walk through his workshop and thinks he recognises the distinctive squeak of his prosthetic leg as being that of his abuser when he was imprisoned. His immediate reaction, driven perhaps by fear and rage, is to kidnap the man and take him to a lonely desert place to bury him alive. When the man (Ebrahim Azizi) denies being ‘Eghbal the Pegleg’, he sows a seed of doubt in Vahid‘s mind and sets him on a path where he seeks the help of other ex prisoners to try and work out if this is the guy or not.

There is a certain self-conscious style to the film, with some carefully selected backdrops and narrative elements, such as one of the ex prisoners being in her wedding dress. There is also one character Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), who is the ‘crazy one’, and provides the complication to what Vahid thinks is quite a reasonable attempt to identify their abuser.

Some elements are played for comedy – the sudden reveal of security guards when they are having an argument, the same security guards asking for a bribe and then pulling out a credit card machine, the increasing number of people that fit into Vahid’s white van.

It’s about serious stuff though and we get some extended scenes of somewhat heavy-handed dialogue that spells out the facts. There is also a very tense scene towards the end that didn’t resolve in quite the way I was expecting. I think we are supposed to believe in epiphanies and the very final scene, deliberately ambiguous, seems to be a bit of an easy way of ending the film without actually resolving it.

Do I like Panahi any better? I’m not sure. It was definitely a solid film that will appeal to many, that has the tonal mix and serious subject matter of many a great Iranian film but I’m not sure it will stay with me over time.