We rented this film shortly after Masako and I started to date back in Canada. It had been out of the theaters for more than a year and honestly didn't make a huge impression on me at the time. I was renting roughly ten movies a week for 49 cents from a shop called Video Update and wanted to introduce Masako to some Canadian cinema. Lately, almost subconsciously, I've been choosing films with some kind of daughter story and as Masako can attest since Frankie's birth I've become quite the blubbering idiot when watching these. Shopping for dvd's for Frankie I grabbed this one for myself.

The Sweet Hereafter is the story of a lawyer, played by Ian Holm, who travels to a small grief stricken town in the aftermath of a deadly school bus accident in hopes of securing the families in a class action lawsuit. A somewhat jumbled timeline explores lives before and after the accident and one of the sole survivors played by Sarah Polley, whose own father-daughter relationship leaves me scratching my head.

Ian Holm's character Mitchell would seem like any other "ambulance chaser" if it wasn't for his own tragic relationship with his drug addict daughter when he recalls a story from her childhood when he came close to having to preform an emergency tracheotomy. His three year old daughter innocently staring up at him as the camera pans to show the knife in his hand ready to cut into her throat if she should stop breathing. It's an incredibly powerful scene, watching a parent confronted with the ultimate nightmare and ultimate responsibility.

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