Atom Egoyan's "The sweet hereafter" puts you in a rapturous emotional daze. Adapted from a novel by Russell Banks, Egoyan fills the void of his earlier work and at the same time brings his puzzle structure trickery to spellbinding new levels of artistry. "The sweet hereafter" is a new kind of mystical fairy tale, one that seeks to uncover the forces holding the world together even as they tear it apart. Mitchelle Stevens (Ian Holm) a lonely attorney, journeys to a small town in the snowy wilds of British Columbia. The townspeople have suffered a cataclysmic tragedy and he has come to try to represent them legally in their grief. Egoyan, gliding between past and present, teases our curiosity, revealing the details of the disaster only gradually. By the time we witness, in a memorably chilling image what actually happened the event feels part of something larger, a disturbance in the universe. "The sweet hereafter" is a hymn to the agony of loss, yet it is also saturated with the radiance of parental love. The characters we see here cherished their children. Holm's lawyer has lost his own daughter, a drug addict who spiraled into the gutter and now phones him only for money. He interviews his fellow sufferers with a fascinating mix of motives: He's part ambulance chaster, pat empathetic guru. Egoyan has a Lynchian vision of innocence bound with evil. It's embodies in his brillant use of "The pied piper of Hamelin" as a siren song of erotic dread. This is a movie in which darkness emanates from without and without - form the choices made by a seductive parent, to the random threat of a nest of baby spiders. The film which begins in devestation and ends in grace, is about the birth of a new world, in which parents and children love can love each other helplessly without, ever feeling that they're fully connected. "The sweet hereafter" leaves you shaken and ecstatic as the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.
Review of The Sweet Hereafter
