Dispatch from the BFI London Film Festival 2025

The standout films from the BFI London Film Festival 2025 were all from seasoned directors whose oeuvre could not be more distinguished from each other. From the rippling realism of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident to Joachim Trier’s beautifully perceptive Sentimental Value, and Park Chan-wook’s darkly comic No Other Choice, I was whisked away into worlds both familiar and not yet within my grasp.

It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi

In an interview, Abbas Kiarostami, one of Iran’s most eminent directors, compared Iranian filmmakers to creative architects who might say that they built their best houses on a very difficult piece of land. His disciple Jafar Panahi, a leading figure in the lineage of the Iranian New Wave, is one such creative architect. Officially barred from filmmaking and screenwriting since 2010 on the grounds of political dissent, Panahi persisted in employing cinema as a method of speaking truth to power. His latest It Was Just an Accident, winner of the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2025, was made clandestinely in Iran following a seven-month stint in prison that ended in 2023 once Panahi went on hunger strike.

The premise is simple: A minor car accident turns into a series of escalating incidents where former Iranian political prisoners decide whether or not to exact revenge on their tormentor. A mechanic Vahid, (Vahid Mobasseri), coincidentally encounters a man Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) whose squeaky prosthetic leg suggests that he may the interrogator who years prior had captured and tortured Vahid in prison for protesting on behalf of workers’ rights. Following a slapdash kidnapping, Vahid enlists the help of a motley crew of former inmates who deliberate upon the man’s identity and ultimately determine whether to kill or release him. These characters bound by shared memories and residual rage include Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a snappy wedding photographer, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), an anxious bride and groom, and the irate Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). They argue, bicker, doubt but also find camaraderie and some semblance of catharsis as they cart Eghbal across the desert in the back of Vahid’s van.

In a film by a less accomplished storyteller, perhaps the identity of the man would be established clearly from the beginning. But it is the question and the ambiguity that is the springboard for the narrative. Like the characters who are grappling with their varying perceptions of restorative justice as they grasp for closure, Panahi encourages the viewer to alight on questions of complicity, forgiveness, and the notion of ethical responsibility towards one another in a world where survival doesn’t always mean freedom. Panahi has spoken about It Was Just an Accident being based on a composite of stories told to him by the victims of state repression that he met while he was imprisoned. By developing characters who are navigating life after incarceration, the director teases out the debris of trauma that remains present long after release. I wished to linger a bit longer with some of the characters, especially Shiva, whose bracing performance in the final moments could have packed even more of a punch had Panahi spent a bit more time developing her backstory.

The film thrums with suspense and mordant wit throughout. Panahi is adept at understanding that the human condition has capacity for moments of levity and tenderness in the midst of fury. Humour doesn’t undermine the stakes; it makes them more pronounced. There’s a moving sequence involving Eghbal’s family where Vahid and his crew rise above their desire for retribution thereby highlighting the underlying humanity of a people that flickers brightly despite living under authoritarianism. 

U.K. release date: 5 December.
U.S. release date: 15 October (out now.)

Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier

Norwegian Danish director Joachim Trier has brought his singular sensibility to bear on a remarkable range of works, particularly his Oslo trilogy. His films appear to be dredged from the subconscious; there is no way to experience them except personally.

In one of my favourite films of all time, The Worst Person in the World, Trier and his long-time collaborator, screenwriter Eskil Vogt, traced the existential wandering of young individuals confronting parts of themselves that felt adrift with the expectations and sinking reality of life. With Sentimental Value, the duo widen the aperture to look at a fractured family through successive generations: Sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are mourning the recent death of their mother when their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) re-emerges at the funeral unexpectedly. A revered film director now in the twilight of his career, Gustav lacks the emotional intelligence to repair his relationship with his daughters. In an early scene, he asks Nora, a theatre actor, to star in a film he has written for her. Given their fraught relationship she scoffs at the idea and turns him down. Gustav then serendipitously meets a famous Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who’s a fan and thrilled to take Nora’s role, but increasingly grows unsure of her role when she realises the project is semi-autobiographical for Gustav.

As the consequences of Gustav’s return play out, the sisters gain more clarity about the tragedy that shaped their father’s wounded spirit and reach a renewed acceptance of their childhood and its variegated impacts on each of them. More instrumentally, the film is asking us to consider the ways that art and cinema can and cannot help us heal and connect with others. As with his previous films, here too Trier reveals his penchant for how physical spaces can be used to explore the character’s inner lives. If Worst Person in the World explored the city of Oslo as a psychological landscape, in Sentimental Value the layered family dynamics are explored via a century old family home passed down through generations, where a matriarch once claimed her life and where, in the present day, Gustav wants to shoot his new film.

Trier is masterful in crafting beauty out of stillness and silence. The pacing may frustrate a viewer looking for dramatic narrative arcs, but the allure of the film is in the long pauses between words, the silence that dangles between a father and daughter, the way someone looks out of a window gazing further into the distance. The aching beauty of Renate Reinsve’s extraordinary performance is in its bodily evocation of loneliness that she carries and can only transmute when performing on stage. Equally effective is Ibsdotter Lilleaas who delivers the film’s revelatory performance. The dynamic between the sisters is the film’s beating heart: They argue, confide in each other, fall silent. But undergirding their bond is a quiet, unconditional love that Trier captures with deep tenderness.  

U.K. release date: 26 December.
U.S. release date: 7 November.

No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook

Loosely adapted from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, No Other Choice centres on Yoo Man-su (Squid Games’ Lee Byung-hun in excellent form), a middle manager who spirals into existential crisis after being laid off from a paper mill where he worked for two decades. Threatened with obsolescence as the industry transitions to AI-powered automation, Man-su experiences a series of humiliating interviews and rejections in a job market with an oversupply of applicants for too few openings. His pragmatic wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) downsizes their life and begins working as a dental hygienist, which only furthers his despair and self-pity. When faced with the prospect that he may have to lose his hard-earned dream house, Man-su convinces himself that he has no other choice but to tip the employability prospects back in his favour by eliminating his rivals one by one for a coveted job at a rival paper company.

It’s a macabre proposition and Man-su is not a professional serial killer by any means. Park Chan-wook deploys elegant set pieces, a musical score oscillating between classical Mozart and Korean pop and his trademark visual choreography to highlight the bleak absurdity of a man’s desperation. The result is a film which also plays out like a screwball comedy with a slapstick treatment towards a universal condition – the indignities of salaried labour and the fragility of masculine pride when so much of self-worth is tied to economic success.

Comparisons to Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite are inevitable, given the cultural setting of both films and the theme of scrambling for survival in a capitalist hellscape, but No Other Choice is distinctive in its own right and perhaps feels even more timely in 2025. This tragicomedy of aspiration and entitlement in the age of zero-sum late capitalism is a film of multiple, coexisting genres, relying on agile plotting and turning corporate competition, lack of class solidarity and replaceability in the new digital era into a grim allegory for modern existence.

U.K. release date: 23 January 2026
U.S.: A limited theatrical release is planned for 25 December, with a wider release expected in January 2026.

Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Read more of Rida’s work on Something Curated here.

Header image: Still from It Was Just An Accident © Les Films Pelleas