Conflicts and Resolution

I worried it might be weird to revisit It Was Just an Accident in light of the American attack on Iran, but somehow Jafar Panahi’s latest film stands outside the politics of the moment, cocooned within the parameters of its own internal story. Or maybe it’s just that there’s a timelessness to its questions of guilt and memory, and whether one can corrupt the other if a person is more interested in vengeance than closure. That stuff never gets old.

Indeed, It Was Just an Accident isn’t even a particularly original story; its hook of a former political prisoner abducting the person they believe was once their torturer is an echo of Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play Death and the Maiden, which Roman Polanski brought to the screen in 1994. But where Dorfman was careful to set his play in an unnamed South American nation and limit the characters to just the torture victim, the alleged torturer and the torture victim’s husband, Panahi opens up the story somewhat, assembling an entire jury of former victims to determine whether the man they’ve abducted really is the villain they remember – and if so, to mete out his punishment.

The odds appear to be in their favor: Though none of them ever saw his face, their torturer Eghbal had a distinctive voice and a prosthetic leg that made a distinctive squeak when he walked; it’s the squeak that triggers auto mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) when a stranger (Ebrahim Azizi) brings his car to his garage after hitting a dog. Convinced that this man is Eghbal, Vahid abducts the man and takes him out to the desert to bury him alive, only to have second thoughts and decide the decision shouldn’t be his alone. So he bundles the man into his van and looks up some other survivors of Eghbal’s brutality, hoping one of them will remember something more specific about his captive. But the longer they talk, factions form within the group and the less certain anyone is of anything ... except that they’re all now complicit in the kidnapping of the man in the back of Vahid’s van.

It Was Just an Accident isn’t Panahi’s first thriller – that would be Crimson Gold, made more than two decades ago – but he is a very, very different person these days. As Sheida Dayani points out in her booklet essay, this is his sixth film to be shot clandestinely, after having been repeatedly imprisoned by the Iranian government for his supposed radicalism and banned from making movies. None of this has stopped him, obviously, and what’s truly remarkable is that his movies are somehow even more empathetic and hopeful now, rather than less. I commend him for his clarity, and I am certain I do not possess anything like it.

Criterion’s combo 4K/Blu-ray release offers a pristine presentation of the feature on both platters, with two worthwhile featurettes on the Blu-ray. First, there’s a half-hour conversation between Panahi and Ramin Bahrani, where the two filmmakers discuss the circumstances of the film’s production and how Panahi’s own political situation has forced him to become a diasporic artist even though he works at home. Conducted almost entirely in Farsi, it’s one of the best conversations Criterion has produced in some time. Don’t miss it.

There’s also the 45-minute Cannes press conference from May 2025, in which Panahi and his cast are clearly still processing both the film and the ramifications of making it. It’s less structured, given the random nature of the Q&A format, but still valuable. The theatrical trailer is also included.

Maybe not as important to world cinema, but still pretty good: The Drama. What’s that? The new film from the guy who made Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario proved divisive on its theatrical release? Unthinkable!

But yes, Kristoffer Borgli’s neurotic comedy was pilloried for its hook, and I suppose that’s no surprise: The Drama is about a couple trying to deal with an unexpected revelation in the days before their wedding, and if the nature of that revelation hasn’t been spoiled for you I’m certainly not going to do it here. I’ll only say Borgli’s film is about how everyone carries secrets they’d rather not share, and what happens when one of those secrets isn’t the worst thing you can imagine hearing from your partner, but the actual worst thing a person can say.

That’s what The Drama is about, but it’s also about a whole bunch of other things: It’s about how our current selves are built on all the people we used to be, for good or ill, and the gaps that exist between all of us. It’s about love and commitment and faith and the blind leaps we all take whenever we do something with another person. It’s about how interesting it is to watch Zendaya sit and fume quietly, and how Robert Pattinson clearly enjoys playing weird little freaks.

It’s also, incidentally, about America’s unique relationships to both morality and hypocrisy, and god knows that’s never going to go out of style.

Borgli is an old-school provocateur, and The Drama – like Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario before it – is asking you to think about the difference between thought and action, empathy and complicity, and whether depiction really does equal endorsement. It poses these questions in a heightened comic environment, but it also makes room for a quiet little study of someone who’s faced their darkness and literally become their best self, but can’t get anyone to appreciate how much work it took to get there. Weird no one else wanted to talk about that.

A24 offers The Drama in separate 4K and Blu-ray releases, each with the same suite of extras: A loose but obsessively detailed commentary by costume designer Katina Danabassis, co-editor Joshua Raymond Lee and production designer Zosia Mackenzie, a 17-minute making-of featurette, “Unpacking The Drama,” wardrobe and camera tests, the “Relationship Hotline” promo and Charlie and Emma’s wedding video, which is exactly the sort of mischief Borgli likes to pull on his audience.

The discs are packaged in A24’s signature digipacks, with a sextet of Kristina Tzekova art cards illustrating key moments in the film. In Canada, domestic distributor VVS Films offers the commentary and the featurette, along with a social-media goof in which Zendaya and Pattinson pretend to tolerate an astrological reading of their own compatibility, on its bilingual Blu.

There’s a little pretending going on in Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, but it’s mostly well-intentioned. This is a print-the-legend take on superstardom, re-creating the King’s ’70s Las Vegas residency in all of its spectacle. And there was a lot of it.

Luhrmann takes his time getting to the performance, spending nearly half an hour building up to it with a recap of Elvis’ path to the International Hotel which, just a handful of years after Luhrmann’s own fictional run at Presley’s life, feels maybe a little unnecessary. Maybe he’s offering the real version to satisfy the estate, or maybe there just wasn’t that much live concert footage available to him. Either way, Luhrmann is nothing if not a showman, and he knows how to make an audience wait for the good stuff. And when we finally get onstage with Elvis and his accompanists? Yeah, that’s the good stuff.

EPiC is entirely composed of archival material, sourced from a variety of audio recordings, television reports and 8mm, 16mm and 35mm footage, all of it restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Circus – which did similar high-end conversions and restorations for James Cameron’s recent 4K releases and Jackson’s own Beatles documentary Get Back. There’s some obvious video and audio sweetening here, including a string section on “Burning’ Love” – a number constructed out of a montage of rehearsal footage – and a lot of questionable background audio in crowd scenes where the audience and bystanders could not possibly have been recorded, but there’s nothing as egregious as the plastinated faces and CGI mouth movements in Get Back.

Luhrmann’s aesthetic preference, as always, is simply More!, so he’s supercharged the colors of the predominantly polyester wardrobe, and everyone in the frame has perfectly clear skin – even Col. Tom, whose blotchiness is simply a matter of historical fact. But no, this is an idealized vision of Elvis, who always looks bright-eyed and healthy, even as sweat pours down his face and his weight fluctuates from clip to clip. He’s killing himself offstage, but the fans don’t know it, and EPiC sees Elvis exactly as they did, inexhaustible, incandescent and full of good cheer. Baz Luhrmann is nothing if not a fan.

With all that factored in, the 4K release of EPiC is absolutely glorious; I watched Elevation’s disc, but I expect the Decal release uses the same master. The opening logos are almost three-dimensional, designed to dazzle on a large-format screen, and the shifting aspect ratio is fluid and nicely managed. (The Vegas concert material is consistently framed at 2.39:1, the better to showcase the amassed talent onstage.) The DTS-MA 5.1 audio spins the instrumentation around the room while keeping Elvis’ vocals centered in the soundscape, always anchoring the music. It’s intended to be overwhelming; every shot will leave you wishing you’d seen this in IMAX. But the home game is very strong.

EPiC offers a handful of trailers and TV spots as bonus material, but that’s it; it feels like a missed opportunity to roll out some unrestored footage of complete performances, the better to see how extensive Park Circus’ work really was.

Finally, I don’t have much to say about last week’s other new release, They Will Kill You. It’s another of those eat-the-rich genre works that are in vogue right now – and with good reason – with Zazie Beetz as a young woman who joins the housekeeping staff of a Manhattan high-rise to rescue her kid sister (Myha’la) from the clutches of an elaborate supernatural conspiracy. Patricia Arquette, with a wobbly Irish accent, embodies the evil as the building’s manager; Heather Graham and Tom Felton are the most recognizable faces among her cloaked and masked acolytes. Everybody has machetes and hammers for some reason.

Thanks to the aforementioned supernatural thing, the villains can’t be killed; thanks to her righteous mission, our hero can’t be stopped. It’s an unapologetic mashup of Rosemary’s Baby and The Raid, with the sound cues and snap zooms of ’70s pulp action for extra sizzle, but in the end that’s all it is; while director and co-writer Kirill Sokolov is an undoubtedly enthusiastic mayhem-dispenser his movie never quite transcends its references.

Radio Silence’s Ready or Not movies use dysfunctional family relationships to ground their big choices and bloody payoffs, and the Knives Out trilogy wraps its stories of underdogs toppling power structures in self-aware whodunits. They Will Kill You is well-made and swiftly paced – 94 minutes and out, baby! –and Beetz brings gritty commitment and convincing ferocity to her role, but there are just so many better versions of this story.

Warner’s 4K disc looks and sounds great, though, and Sokolov’s set pieces will look great splashed across the walls of bars and clubs for years to come. The image is pristine, with an HDR grade that really brings out the detail in those cloaks – or are they rain ponchos? – and livens up the colors of all the spurty stuff, and the Dolby Atmos mix is so precise that I could tell precisely where every drop of blood was splattering in the first decapitation.

Four supplements draw on the same interview material, with “Director’s Log: The Making of They Will Kill You” followed by looks at the production design (“Developing the Virgil”), Beetz’ stunt training (“Asia Reaves’ Attacks” and the fight choreography (“Crafting Carnage”). Total running time is just under half an hour, and everyone seems to be having a good time. It’s nice when that happens, isn’t it?

 

It Was Just an Accident is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo edition and a BD-only release in the Criterion Collection; The Drama and They Will Kill You are available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from A24 and Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, respectively, though VVS’s Canadian edition of The Drama is Blu-ray only. And EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Decal Releasing in the US and Elevation Pictures in Canada; a BD-only edition is also available from Decal in the US, but why would you even bother.

Up next: The Christophers, Obsession, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy lead another wave of new releases hitting the shelves, and there’s still all those boxed sets to get to. Oh, and some new catalogue releases. You’ll see.

… oh, and speaking of Obsession, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment is graciously offering Shiny Things readers the chance to win one of two 4K/Blu-ray combos of Curry Barker’s horror smash. Just e-mail me at normwilner@gmail.com with the subject line “One Wish Willow” by noon ET on Monday, July 13^th! Winners will be selected at random; contest is open to all North American residents. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, I know this was a long one.