It’s natural for people to try to find meaning for such a senseless tragedy. Atom Egoyan blends this tendency with the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin to come up with The Sweet Hereafter, a film about a small town in Canada coping with the events after a tragedy involving schoolchildren. Big-city lawyer Mitchell Stephens is hired to make amends and find a legal scapegoat – one that can provide closure, a source of income, and a target for anger – by these children’s parents. Unfortunately, the introduction of this lawyer brings unpleasant memories and feelings to the surface of both parties. Stephens, with his drug-addict daughter, struggles not to blame himself for his daughter’s outcome as he helps the town find something to blame for the crash. He demands justice for the townspeople when he is unable to find one for the way his daughter turned out. “There is no such thing as an accident” he says, as the film jumps between timelines, focusing on events before the accident, after the accident, and two years later when Stephens is reminded again of his daughter in a chance encounter on an airplane. To make the chronology seem more complicated, some parts of the film are overlayed with a crash survivor Nicole reading a story about the legend of the Pied Piper to two children. This legend, which many already know, has an origin that is disputed: what exactly happened to all of the children that the Pied Piper led astray? Differing explanations chalk it up to dancing hysteria, that the titular piper was a child murderer, or that the children contracted a disease, starved, or drowned in a river. Whatever truly happened in Hamelin, we don’t know. Just as we don’t know in this movie. Ultimately, the parents in this film are more self-serving than altruistic. It’s a film about grief, about the bloody mess it creates and happy façade that it demolishes. Slavoj Žižek called it “the film about the impact of trauma on a community.” There is nothing “sweet” about the hereafter, this tragedy rips people apart more than it brings people together. It’s a cold, depressing movie about children and tragedy where a silver lining is hard to find. Maybe it’s about finding solace in art? The Pied Piper tale that Nicole reads paints a cheery aftermath of the children’s’ disappearance, a fantasy that is better than the reality. Yet, Nicole is led to believe a fantasy in the hereafter as well, being treated like a “princess” by her dad, obscuring the awful truth beneath all of that tactful pampering. What’s great about The Sweet Hereafter is that there are no easy answers to questions like this one, there’s a healthy sense of ambiguity throughout, that sucks you in and makes you think about it for days after.