M. Il mostro di Teheran. Sull’uso del fuoricampo in 'Un semplice incidente'

This essay analyzes the use of off-screen space in Jafar Panahi's A Simple Accident (Yak taṣādof-e sāde, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 2025), winner of the Palme d'Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. Taking Fritz Lang's M (1931) as its theoretical and cinematic reference point, the article argues that Panahi deploys off-screen space, ellipsis, and the long take as interconnected expressive strategies to evoke the unspeakable violence of political torture and the pervasive, invisible presence of state repression. The torturer Eghbal is progressively displaced to the margins and then entirely outside the frame, becoming what Pascal Bonitzer would call a "blind field" — an absent yet oppressive force that implicates both characters and spectators. In contrast to Panahi's recent autobiographical films, where the director's own body embodied the principle of visibility, A Simple Accident marks a step back toward allusion and subtraction, recovering classical and modern cinematic strategies that place their trust in the theoretical and imaginative power of the image.