Stephens is a lawyer who arrives in the Rocky Mountains hamlet of Sam Dent, where a bus crash has cost the lives of fourteen children. He hopes to persuade the mourning parents to claim damages from the bus company. The lawyer also finds himself at a difficult point in his life: he is divorced from his wife and has a drug-addicted daughter he tries to keep at arm’s length. The talks he has with the locals make it plain to the lawyer just how much the accident has affected all the relation¡ships in the small community. Some parents want to do business with the ‘ambulance chaser’, but others, such as garage-owner and widower Ansell, who lost both his children, threaten Stephens with violence. The evidence of Nicole, who survived the accident but is confined to a wheelchair, is crucial for the claim.A brilliant play with time in The Sweet Hereafter slowly but surely reveals all the secrets of the village. With his film version of a book by Russell Banks, Egoyan is making his first film not based on a story of his own. This gives his characters even more emotional depth without losing Egoyan’s typical style. The director added to Banks’ story about the dead children the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a device the writer says he wished he had thought of himself.
