The Sweet Hereafter

A small town in British Columbia loses many of its children when the school bus goes through the ice. A class action lawyer, Mitchell Stephens, arrives to sign the grieving families to a suit. Egoyan tells the story out of order, cutting between the days before the crash, the aftermath, and a later flight on which the lawyer recalls his own daughter.

Critics noted the fractured chronology, which withholds the crash itself and lets dread gather around ordinary moments. The film threads Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin through Nicole's reading: a town stripped of its young, and the piper who leads them away. Egoyan keeps the camera at a distance, so grief registers in gesture and silence rather than open display.

For the clinician the film stages a community's mourning and its need to find someone to blame, the lawsuit standing in for work the bereaved cannot approach directly. Nicole carries private knowledge of her father, an incest hidden beneath the family's standing, and her deposition turns on what she chooses to withhold. The wish to convert loss into a case, and blame into settlement, runs through every home.