Russell Banks' novel is called Affliction and, like his equally laugh-impacted The Sweet Hereafter, resolves itself around death and stasis. Or rather, stasis and then death. If in that other book -- and Atom Egoyan's wonderfully rich film -- the death of a town's children brought about the numbness that blanketed it, then Affliction is about the death that follows inevitably from the stasis of Wade Whitehouse's life. The end of Paul Schrader's extremely faithful film is never in any doubt; it provides the picture with a chill far colder than any that spring from its snow-quilted New Hampshire setting.

The hulking Wade (Nick Nolte) is cop for the small town of Lawford; ostensibly in charge but in reality pocketed by local rich man LaRiviere (Holmes Osborne). His marriage collapsed acrimoniously and his relationship with their young daughter is a mess. There is a girlfriend (the calm, level Sissy Spacek), but there is also a father in the not inconsiderable shape of James Coburn. A brutal, alcoholic, cruel and petty-minded father who physically abused his sons -- Willem Dafoe being the other -- and haunts them on into adulthood.

For the first thirty or so minutes -- as with the book’s opening -- you could come away thinking Affliction a murder mystery. A union man under investigation is shot out deer hunting and Wade suspects that LaRiviere and his young rival Jack Hewitt (Jim True) are in cahoots.

But very soon that tread collapses in on itself and Nolte pursues conspiracy where there is none. He wants to weave webs, to make a difference to the town, to his daughter, to himself. It's this truth -- and the death of his mother -- that turns him, that makes him face down his situation. Affliction is not even about the tiny physical world it inhabits so much as Wade Whitehouse's internal collapse: the projection of God's Lonely Man onto Banks' already bleak novel. This is a horror movie, its turbulent climax inexorable.

Nolte, one of Hollywood's best and least well used, has never been much better than he is here. Hobbled and bruised, beset by a nagging toothache, Wade’s constant pain can be physically licked -- with wince-inducing pliers -- but, mentally, will devastate him.

In casting his lead, Schrader clearly left nowhere else to go than to Coburn, just about the only actor physically able to out-bulk Nolte. His performance has weight and authority and remains just the right side of scenery-chewing. He didn't deserve his Oscar nod in quite the same way as his co-star, but this is a showcase for macho acting of a quality all too rare these days. Against them Dafoe has very little to do (there's some superfluous narration), and Spacek is virtually lost, despite giving a performance of genuine worth.

By luck or design, Sweet Hereafter lensman Peter Sarossy returns to the snow to photograph this as an even smaller, darker portrait; exteriors are cramped and claustrophobic. This is a bitterly cold picture, underscored perfectly by avant-New Age composer Michael Brook's brooding score.

Of course, working from a far more linear novel, Schrader's task as scriptwriter is markedly easier than the monumental job Egoyan set himself, but then this is, after all, a different kind of film. If The Sweet Hereafter is about sudden change and revelation, then Affliction is about inevitability and the heavy drag of the past. That you know the structure -- if not the facts -- of the end already is Banks' point. That you can care, even after sitting through two almost unremittingly barren hours in the cinema, is a triumph all Schrader's own.