The Sweet Hereafter (1997) on Netflix
A school bus crash in Sam Dent, British Columbia, kills fourteen children. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer from out of town, arrives to press the grieving families into a class-action suit.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.4/1037,174 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
On a snowy winter morning in Sam Dent, British Columbia, Dolores Driscoll drives the school bus with the children aboard, as she has for fifteen years. Billy Ansel drives behind the bus in his truck and waves to his twins, Jessica and Mason, who sit at the back. The bus hits ice, runs through a barrier and goes into a lake, killing fourteen children. Among the grieving parents are Billy and the families of Sean Walker and Bear Otto. Nicole Burnell, a teenage singer, is left paralyzed from the waist down. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer from out of town, urges the reluctant parents and Dolores to sue the town and the bus company, arguing negligence. Billy wants nothing to do with the case, and Stephens carries his own grief over his daughter Zoe.
Cast
- Caerthan Banksas Zoe Stevens
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Russell Banks's novel grew out of a real disaster: a 1989 bus crash in Alton, Texas, that killed 21 students and set off a string of lawsuits.
- Egoyan moved the story from upstate New York to British Columbia in order to qualify for Canadian funding, and wove in Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin to make the film play as what he called a "grim fairy tale".
- Donald Sutherland was set to play lawyer Mitchell Stephens and quit, and the role went to Ian Holm, who took it saying it was not often you were offered a leading role at 65 and that it was his first lead in a movie.
- The three prizes it took at Cannes in 1997 were the highest honor a Canadian film had won there, and Egoyan became the first Canadian to take the Grand Prix; no other followed until Xavier Dolan in 2016.
