Justin Chang

The bride, who's dressed in her full white gown, turns out to be one of Pegleg's victims, too.

Before long, Vahid's van has picked up so many passengers that it starts to resemble a clown car, or maybe the yellow Volkswagen van from Little Miss Sunshine.

Most of those passengers want Iqbal dead, but none of them can be 100% certain he's the guilty party, and they bicker relentlessly about what to do next.

As deadly serious as everything is, Panahi pushes the action and the banter to often farcical extremes.

He's made a road movie in which the characters keep going around and around in circles.

It's startling just how funny It Was Just an Accident can be.

It's attuned to the comic futility as well as the horror of the situation.

there's an especially dry running gag, in which Vahid finds himself forced to bribe various people, from security guards to hospital nurses.

A jab at the banal everyday corruption of life under an oppressive system.

As day bleeds into night, it was just an accident builds to a dramatic climax of lacerating emotional force.

A sequence so intense, you can practically feel Panahi's rage burning a hole through the screen.

His movie, in weighing the question of revenge versus mercy, is an obvious warning to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

But it also feels like a warning to people living under those regimes.

Several weeks ago, I moderated a Q&A with Panahi in Los Angeles, a city he hadn't visited in almost 20 years.

While we were talking before the Q&A...

Panahi turned to me with a grave look on his face and said, I'm worried about your country.

The writer and director Mike Flanagan has become a well-regarded name in modern horror. known for his TV versions of The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. He's also made a couple of Stephen King adaptations, including the films Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, and he's currently working on a new series version of Carrie.

The writer and director Mike Flanagan has become a well-regarded name in modern horror. known for his TV versions of The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. He's also made a couple of Stephen King adaptations, including the films Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, and he's currently working on a new series version of Carrie.

The writer and director Mike Flanagan has become a well-regarded name in modern horror. known for his TV versions of The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. He's also made a couple of Stephen King adaptations, including the films Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, and he's currently working on a new series version of Carrie.

His latest movie, The Life of Chuck, is both a continuation of this trend and a bit of a departure from it. It's based on a 2020 King novella that draws on horror conventions without quite becoming a full-blown horror story. King's work can be unabashedly sentimental as well as genuinely scary. And this movie is a mystery with a maudlin streak.