The Sweet Hereafter

REVIEW
Low-key and desolate in tone, Egoyan's adaptation of the Russell Banks novel is a profound and intimate portrait of a small town reeling from tragedy. Holm is impenetrably brilliant as Mitchell Stephens, an ambulance-chasing lawyer who descends on the inhabitants of Sam Dent, a community nestled in the Canadian Rockies, in the hopes of convincing them to join a class-action suit concerning a deadly school bus accident. As he is digging deep into the town's collective sorrow, he is also uncovering his own disjointed sense of loss -- a point punctuated by repeated calls on his cell phone from his drug-addicted daughter. Egoyan masterfully flashes back to the months and moments leading up to the calamity, and seamlessly snakes the film's timeline back and forth. And, as with all of Egoyan's films, the characters' inner struggles take center stage. Polley excels as a teenager who survives but who pays a terrible price.