While floods, volcanoes, and metropolis-raiding dinosaurs noisily tear apart movie screens across America, The Sweet Hereafter calmly tiptoes in and presents its own unique variation on the "disaster movie." Here, the frenzy of the disaster is not the key; the film instead focuses on the aftermath: the deep psychological effect it has on the community.

The disaster at hand is a ghastly accident that kills half of the children in a quiet Canadian town. On an otherwise normal winter's day, a school bus slides on an icy patch and plunges off the road. The bus skids down to a frozen lake, where the ice breaks out from under the heavy vehicle, pulling the bus and its occupants underwater. The scene is heart-stopping and unforgettable, like the terrifying plane crash in Alive. The incident kills 14 children and yields only a few survivors, notably Rose (Dolores Driscoll), the bus driver, and Nicole (Sarah Polley), a teen with dreams of becoming a country singer.

How can a town come to terms with a disaster that steals its children? The local school responds by giving monetary compensations to the grieving families, but the gesture does little to solve the problem that an entire generation has been all but destroyed. Searching for answers, several of the residents join together to form a class action suit with the help of Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm). Stevens is a big-city lawyer accustomed to this type of case. In his mind, there is no such thing as an accident. He believes that somewhere, a person or company must be responsible for the atrocity.

Stevens's own situation allows him to sympathize with the devastated town members. His daughter, a drug addict named Zoe, has been teetering on the verge of death for years, calling her father for money but refusing his sincere offers for help. At one point in the movie, Stevens reflects on his daughter's condition and expresses a disturbing theme for the film: the entire world has lost its children, their souls emptied by television and shopping malls. The link between the school bus tragedy and the divided Stevens family in The Sweet Hereafter forecasts the frightening effects of such an alienation between children and parents.

Director Atom Egoyan constructs The Sweet Hereafter with the precision of an elaborate mosaic, rearranging the chronological tiles of the story and carefully resetting them in an effective, yet confusing order. At first, jumps between parts of the story prove to be frustrating for the audience, but as the movie draws to a close, the seemingly disparate elements fuse together to reveal an air-tight and ingenious "greater purpose."

Egoyan adapted The Sweet Hereafter from Russel Banks's novel, retooling the script with his distinctive attention to detail. The novel, inspired by a real school bus accident in Texas, is separated into four parts, in which different characters tell the story from their unique perspectives. The movie has no distinct narrator, though Egoyan clearly focuses on Stevens. This perspective gives us an interesting view of the popular legal solution to society's problems: the lawsuit, clearly a superficial solution in the film.

As an allegory for the accident, Egoyan uses Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," in which the piper steals the children from a city after the residents refuse to pay him for his services. While the poem is almost a perfect match, its inclusion in the film is somewhat contrived, and Egoyan hammers in the similarities without trusting our intelligence. Usually a master at subtlety, Egoyan goes overboard in his dependence on the comparison.

Like Exotica and Egoyan's other movies, The Sweet Hereafter is laden with minute mysteries which he discreetly introduces without elaboration. Delicate hints show how the loss of one character's wife allows him to deal with his children's death, while suggestions of incest could explain the way another character reacts to the accident. Egoyan never gives us the answers, leaving us to sort through the many questions that surface. Watching The Sweet Hereafter only once could never be sufficient to capture the many facets of the story.

The story's rare insights into the way we deal with suffering, coupled with outstanding performances by highly talented actors, make The Sweet Hereafter one of the most thought-provoking films of 1997. While some people let the misery seep in and destroy their lives, others accept the unchangeable. Stevens, who specializes in using money to heal wounds, ignores the accident's potential to teach him how he can deal with his own problems. Nevertheless, we learn something from his experiences.

In the final scene of the movie, we see both possible outcomes brilliantly illustrated: one character has faced the past and chosen to get on with her life, while Stevens judges her silently, unable to shake his lasting impressions of the accident. The effect is haunting. In a profoundly disturbing way, The Sweet Hereafter illustrates how pain can destroy lives long after the source has disappeared. At the same time, the film shows how a community can triumph in the face of the greatest of disasters.