SOURCE: “Atom Egoyan's Particles of Faith: Director of The Sweet Hereafter Believes in Smart Audiences for His Complex Films,” in Washington Post, December 14, 1997, p. G10.

In the following essay, Waxman notes that viewers must work to unravel the plot elements in The Sweet Hereafter.

Watching Atom Egoyan's new film The Sweet Hereafter can be rather like living through the turbulent events it depicts.

The film tells the story of a school bus accident in a small rural Canadian town and the big-city lawyer—himself a tormented soul—who arrives looking for a lawsuit.

As the film wends its way through the town's heartbreak, it focuses on several families—some hippies who lose an adopted Indian son, a widower who witnesses the crash and loses his twins, a talented teenage girl who survives but is scarred by incest. With no regard to time frame or context, the scenes flow...