IN `HEREAFTER,' HOLM DELIVERS POWERFUL PERFORMANCE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

``The Sweet Hereafter'' is so unremittingly sad, it all but dares you not to take it seriously. It isn't quite the great work of art such gravity would indicate; the Canadian director Atom Egoyan's more personal movies (``Exotica,'' ``The Adjuster,'' ``Speaking Parts''), in fact, are markedly more mesmerizing and daring.

But there's no denying that this film, adapted from Russell Banks' achingly brilliant novel, is a humane work wrought with extraordinary care. It had better be; the subject is a small, isolated community's struggle to cope with the loss of many of its children. That was haunting and thought-provoking on the page, but it is inevitably more devastating when acted out.

Egoyan has employed lots of distancing devices - a scattered time frame, lots of nice, snowy landscapes, judicious deployment of the somnambulistic acting that is one of his creative trademarks - to cushion the pain. But nothing, really, could have made such a movie go down easy.

The fine English actor Ian Holm seemed to realize this, so he played the film's pivotal figure, personal-injury lawyer Mitchell Stephens, with uncut, driving bitterness. Stephens comes to Sam Dent, British Columbia, to organize grieving parents into a class-action suit. Never mind what entity is actually to blame for the incident, in which a school bus plunged off an icy road into a cold lake; there's a deep pocket somewhere, and it must be made to cough up for this.

The movie would be much less interesting if Stephens were just a greedy slickster. As neighbors fall out over his determined proddings - some naturally wish to grieve in private or forget the tragedy, while others feel they're owed something for their loss or could just use the bucks - it emerges that no amount of blood money will ever still Stephens' tortured soul. His own daughter (played by the novelist's daughter, Caerthan Banks) is a drug addict, and Stephens sees Sam Dent's tragedy as a stage for working out his own fatherly traumas.

Being the most unique (and powerfully performed), Stephens' story comes to dominate the movie. But of all the book's other individual dramas, Egoyan chose to zero in on a father-daughter incest plot line, with a bunch of Pied Piper references added for good measure. Like everything in the movie, this is handled with care and certainly does not betray Banks' original vision. But it also serves to focus blame in a piece whose great, heart-rending theme is the fundamental futility of that powerful, bred-in-the-bone impulse.

``The Sweet Hereafter'' won three prizes at the last Cannes Film Festival, though not the top one, and has received respectable response at other prestigious festivals. Seems a tad obligatory, all that. Outside of Holms' fervid performance, the most remarkable thing the film has to offer is a relentless conviction that feeling bad is good for you.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Sweet Hereafter'' (R; sex, language, nudity, children in jeopardy, drug use).

The stars: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose, Alberta Watson.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Atom Egoyan, based on Russell Banks' novel. Produced by Egoyan and Camelia Frieberg. Released by Fine Line Features.

Running time: One hour, 50 minutes.

Playing: Goldwyn Pavilion, West L.A.; Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

Our rating: Three Stars.