Affliction

Wade Whitehouse is a small-town police officer in Lawford, New Hampshire, scraping by on odd jobs for a local businessman while struggling with a failed marriage, a strained relationship with his daughter, and a domineering, alcoholic father. When a union official named Evan Twombley dies during a hunting trip, the death is quickly written off as an accident. Wade refuses to accept that explanation and begins investigating it as a crime, a pursuit that isolates him from those around him and pushes him toward a breakdown.

The film was directed by Paul Schrader, who also wrote the screenplay, and it stands as the tenth of the twenty-two features he has directed in chronological order, arriving between Witch Hunt and Auto Focus. Nick Nolte leads the cast as Wade, alongside Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Mary Beth Hurt and Jim True-Frost, with thirty credited performers in all. Produced by Linda Reisman for a budget of six million dollars, it is a Canadian, American and Japanese co-production.

Affliction drew a critics' rating of 7.6 out of 10 from 49 reviews, notably higher than its audience score on TMDB, where it holds 6.3 out of 10 from 334 votes. At the worldwide box office it returned roughly the amount it cost to make.