Critical reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of 61 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Director Atom Egoyan examines tragedy and its aftermath with intelligence and empathy." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 91 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". In 2002, readers of Playback voted it the greatest Canadian film ever made. In 2004, the Toronto International Film Festival ranked it third in the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time, tied with Goin' Down the Road, and in 2015, it was the sole film in the third spot.
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, calling it "one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition." Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, said "this fusion of Mr. Banks's and Mr. Egoyan's sensibilities stands as a particularly inspired mix", with Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood "particularly good here". Brendan Kelly of Variety praised The Sweet Hereafter as "Egoyan's most ambitious work to date", and as "a rich, complex meditation on the impact of a terrible tragedy on a small town", adding Polley and Tom McCamus are "excellent".
Entertainment Weekly gave the film an A, saying it "puts you in a rapturous emotional daze", and calling it a "hymn to the agony of loss" and "a new kind of mystical fairy tale, one that seeks to uncover the forces holding the world together, even as they tear it apart." Paul Tatara of CNN called The Sweet Hereafter "devastating" and wrote Ian Holm gives "the performance of his hugely impressive career." David Denby of New York magazine said that the film had "Ian Holm's greatest role in the movies" and the cast are "all excellent". The film made over 250 critics' Top 10 lists for the best films of 1997.
In 2001, an industry poll conducted by Playback named it the best Canadian film of the preceding 15 years.
In 2004, Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek called The Sweet Hereafter "arguably the film about the impact of trauma on a community." That year, The New York Times also included the film on its list of "the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made". In 2011, British director Clio Barnard praised the "real depth" and "healthy ambiguity" of the story and described Holm and Polley as "brilliant", giving "powerful, subtle performances". One year later, The A.V. Club named The Sweet Hereafter the 22nd best film of the 1990s, praising it as a "masterpiece of adaptation".
