The Sweet Hereafter

Name: The Sweet Hereafter
Genre: Drama

Canada · 1997
Rated R · 1h 52m
Director Atom Egoyan
Starring Ian Holm, Caerthan Banks, Sarah Polley, Tom McCamus
Genre Drama

A small Canadian mountain community is devastated after an accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead. A big-city lawyer arrives to help the survivors' and victims' families prepare a class-action suit, but his efforts only seem to make things worse. Meanwhile, a teenaged survivor of the accident must reckon with a different kind of damage.

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What are critics saying?

New Times (L.A.) by Andy Klein

For all its mystery and its stylistic finesse, there is something vaguely plodding about The Sweet Hereafter.

The New York Times by Elvis Mitchell

The filmmaker creates schematic, intuitive images that hauntingly crystallize the characters' situations.

100

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

This is truly a great film -- easily one of 1997's best.

Film.com by John Hartl

It's the survivors of this tragedy that must make peace with their fate, and the film finally rests with them.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

The power and reach of this undertaking are formidable.

100

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year.

100

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision.

USA Today by Mike Clark

A little movie almost perfectly realized.

100

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition.

Washington Post by Stephen Hunter

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.