“A deliciously dark comedy until it isn’t funny anymore, and one powerful scene knocks it out of the park.”

When a film’s title refers to something being ‘simple’, of course it never is. Certainly not when it’s a Jafar Panahi film. With Panahi present at the Palais des Festivals in the flesh for the premiere of his latest, Un simple accident, you wonder if it’s a good idea for him to go back to Tehran. Technically still serving a 20-year ban on filmmaking, a ban that hasn’t stopped him from making several films since, Un simple accident sees him at his most politically blunt, telling the story of a group of victims of a man who tortured them some years before on behalf of the state following a workers’ conflict over delayed payments. Premiering this delightfully dark comedy that eventually drops the comedy but keeps the darkness to powerful effect, wisdom suggests Panahi should stick around on the Croisette for a couple more days, as he may just nab a prize at the end.

Back to the accident. Sure, it is simple enough, but the chain of events it sets off is anything but. Driving down an unlit road at night with his pregnant wife and young daughter, Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) hits a stray dog. Perturbed by the incident he continues on his way, but the car breaks down not much further along. Luck will have it that he finds himself in front of a repair shop of sorts, with one of its employees willing to help the family get back on the road. It’s another employee though, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), whose attention Rashid draws. Vahid would recognize that squeaky sound of Rashid’s prosthetic leg anywhere. It’s Eghbal, the Peg Leg, his torturer. He is sure of it. Vahid follows the family home, then the next morning kidnaps the man he is after while the guy is waiting for his car to get fully fixed. He drives the man out into the desert to bury him alive, but Rashid’s denials are insistent enough to make Vahid have doubts. What to do?

As time goes by, Vahid gathers a not-so-merry band of other former victims of Eghbal, hoping that one of them can confirm this is indeed the guy they have been looking for so they can exact revenge. Shiva the photographer (Maryam Afshari), bride-to-be Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and her clueless groom Ali (Majid Panahi), and hothead Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) slowly fill up Vahid’s van, where he keeps his prey in a large toolbox. Hamid, after feeling both the prosthetic leg and the man’s surviving leg, scars and all, is the one that is positive this is their nemesis, the man that made their lives a living hell. Back to the desert and the gaping hole that Vahid dug. But then the man’s phone rings, and a young girl is on the other end of the line crying that her mother is dying. Suddenly those about to get their revenge find themselves in a moral dilemma.

Panahi approaches the conundrum of Vahid and later the others with a delightfully dark streak of humor. If it wasn’t in Farsi, one would say this story was the brainchild of Joel and Ethan Coen. The gradual accumulation of people in the back of Vahid’s van and the verbal in-fighting and jabs are used to great comedic effect, as is a running gag of them having to pay off all sorts of people, from gas station employees to security guards and nurses, in order to stay out of trouble. Revenge is sweet, but also costly. Panahi only slowly reveals the connection between the revenge team, as well as the reason they were arrested, which turns out to be a labour dispute over delayed salary payments. When the film finally gets around to answering the question whether the man they captured is really the man who still haunts their nightmares, the comedy is dropped, and the film takes on a dark and very sinister tone, with Afshari as Shiva giving the most powerful single-scene performance this festival. The question will be answered, and the consequences are brilliantly laid out in a small coda, but it is what is said during this scene that should get the most attention.

Un simple accident describes in great detail the torture methods of the regime’s henchmen, apart from the question of whether Rashid is simply himself or the Peg Leg, and it also lays out Iran’s involvement in the wars in Syria. Not that that is a secret, but it implicitly makes clear what kind of men the powers that be in Tehran send out there. This is Panahi at his most openly critical. Gone are the layers and metaphors, as the naked accusations leveled at a torturer who works for those powers are frighteningly clear. And that clarity helps Un simple accident, which is a deliciously dark comedy until it isn’t funny anymore, and one powerful scene knocks it out of the park.