Let’s begin with a question: Have you ever wanted to watch a two-hour funeral for an entire town set in a snow globe of sorrow, where every character speaks like they’ve recently been diagnosed with terminal reflection? Welcome to Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter—a film so sad, so relentlessly elegiac, it should come with a free therapy session and a coupon for Zoloft.
Adapted from Russell Banks’ novel of the same name, The Sweet Hereafter was Egoyan’s big Oscar moment, the one that got the arthouse world to nod in solemn approval while slowly weeping into their herbal tea. It’s supposed to be a moving portrait of grief, loss, and the fragile illusions that hold a community together. What it really is, though, is the cinematic equivalent of shoveling snow off your driveway with a soup spoon—painfully slow, pointlessly repetitive, and cold as hell.
The plot, such as it is, centers on a tragic school bus accident in a small Canadian town that kills a busload of children. Yes, it’s that kind of movie. Funeral gray from frame one. Into this frostbitten emotional crater steps Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a lawyer with the bedside manner of a crowbar, sniffing around for a class-action lawsuit like a grief vulture in a three-piece suit.
Mitchell isn’t here to heal. He’s here to monetize. He swoops into town preaching justice while simultaneously dodging voicemails from his drug-addicted daughter, a subplot that runs through the film like a half-deflated balloon—meant to humanize him, but mostly just reminding us that even lawyers have plot devices.
The townspeople, meanwhile, are each carrying their own cinematic baggage, and I mean that literally. They speak in hushed tones, gaze out windows, and make the kind of meaningful eye contact usually reserved for cult initiations. Nobody just talks. They emote through long pauses, mournful looks, and the universal language of “please kill me before another monologue starts.”
There’s Nicole (Sarah Polley), a young girl left paralyzed by the crash and suddenly turned into the key witness of the lawsuit. Nicole is soft-spoken, sad-eyed, and also possibly lying, but who’s keeping track? Everyone here is lying to someone—mostly themselves. Polley’s performance is strong, but even she can’t escape the gravitational pull of Egoyan’s death march pacing. Her big courtroom moment feels less like a twist and more like someone finally pulling the plug on the life support machine we’ve all been strapped to for 90 minutes.
The film is non-linear, jumping back and forth in time like a melancholic frog on lithium. Egoyan’s editing choices, meant to echo the shattered chronology of grief, mostly serve to remind you how much more time you have left. The accident is doled out in flashbacks so slowly and so solemnly, you’d think you were being punished for caring.
Let’s talk about the visuals. Yes, the snow is pretty. But after 30 minutes of watching people trudge through it like they’re on their way to a wake, it begins to feel like a parody of sadness. Every shot is washed in gray or white, as if color itself went into mourning. The whole town looks like it was decorated by a funeral director with a fetish for bleakness. Even the trees look depressed.
Egoyan’s direction is textbook art-house misery. The camera lingers. And lingers. And then lingers some more, as though it’s afraid to interrupt the actors mid-brood. The film is constantly whispering, “Shhh, something profound is happening,” even when nothing is. Especially when nothing is. It wants to be meditative, but it often just feels paralyzed. Ironically fitting, considering half the cast ends up emotionally or physically immobile.
The musical score, composed by Egoyan’s regular collaborator Mychael Danna, is a minimalist dirge of flutes and melancholy strings. It’s as if someone set The Road to a Lululemon meditation playlist. You half expect Enya to show up and whisper something about the fragility of life before dissolving into the snow.
There’s a lot of “themes” here. Community trauma. The lies we tell to survive. The commodification of grief. And sure, if you squint hard enough and have a tolerance for slow-burning Canadian despair, those themes are present. But they’re buried beneath layers of ice, solemn glances, and artistic choices that seem more interested in impressing a jury at Cannes than engaging with a human audience.
And what’s perhaps most irritating is how The Sweet Hereafter seems so deeply impressed with itself. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a guy at a party explaining Kafka to you while holding a glass of wine he doesn’t like but keeps sipping for appearances. It mistakes stillness for depth, sadness for meaning, and ambiguity for insight. By the time we reach the film’s final shot—another somber face framed by snow—you’ll be begging for an explosion, a car chase, or just someone to crack a goddamn smile.
Let’s not forget the allegorical cherry on top: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is woven throughout the film like a morality tale for grad students. Nicole reads the poem in voiceover, and Egoyan cuts between it and scenes of the town, hinting at the idea that the accident is some karmic comeuppance, that the town’s grief is punishment for past sins. Or maybe it’s just a metaphor for Ian Holm being the rat catcher of trauma. Or maybe Egoyan just really likes allegory. Either way, it’s one Piper short of a drinking game.
To be clear, The Sweet Hereafter isn’t bad in the way most bad movies are bad. It’s not poorly acted or incompetently shot. It’s bad in a way that’s far more insidious: it’s suffocatingly, punishingly, performatively sad. It’s the kind of film that dares you to feel nothing, then judges you if you don’t cry. It’s like an emotional mugging by someone who insists they’re just trying to teach you something.
Final verdict? The Sweet Hereafter is grief porn for the emotionally fluent. It’s a snowy dirge of a film that wears its sadness like a badge of honor but forgets to make that sadness bearable, or even interesting. Watch it if you enjoy funerals, poetry about dead children, and moral ambiguity wrapped in thermal underwear. For everyone else, there’s always Die Hard.