The Sweet Hereafter is something of a first for Atom Egoyan: his first adapted screenplay (from Russell Banks' 1991 novel of the same name); and his first use of a bona fide star. But outside of such considerations, this picture is also immediately recognisable to anyone who has followed the Canadian-Armenian director's extraordinary career thus far.

Holm is outstanding, bringing to town a deft mix of compassion and ambulance-chasing: someone is responsible, goes his mantra. But what's gradually revealed through several elaborately interlocking timelines are deeper-seated reasons for his campaign. He's called on his mobile repeatedly by daughter Zoë (Caerthan Banks), and on an aeroplane, seated beside one of her old school friends, he gradually unburdens himself, explaining how he lost her to drugs. Thus his crusade in Sam Dent becomes one of self-redemption - offering to these devastated families the succour that has so far eluded him.

There remain, however, two citizens determined to hold out against the seduction. Nicole (Sarah Polley) is the teenager who survived the accident in a wheelchair, but is reluctant to be drawn into the collective recriminations. And then there's the haunted Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), a widower who was following the bus at the time it left the road, his own kids now amongst the dead. Both Greenwood and Polley were stars of Egoyan's last, the breakthrough Exotica, and are both better than ever here. There are noteworthy showings too from Maury Chaykin, Arsinee (Mrs Egoyan) Khanjian and, most disturbingly, Tom McCamus as Nicole's creepily youthful father.

The Sweet Hereafter is undoubtedly Egoyan at his most accessible, but his victories are earned with little compromise. This picture has broken his fractured, allusive cinema out of the art house with its deceptively unadorned plotting and surfeit of emotion, but the pull is toward his masterpiece The Adjuster more than to Exotica's relative geniality. The structure is just as meticulous, Egoyan's steadfast refusal to underline just as tantalising. His use of The Pied Piper of Hamelin throughout is tellingly evocative.

Paul Sarossy's snowy widescreen photography and Mychael Danna's atmospheric neo-mediaeval score are as exceptional as they are understated. This is a story about guilt and grief, and it goes about its work with subtle but devastating restraint. The results are as compassionate as they are intellectual, as moving as the film is starkly beautiful.