A TIGHT SCRIPT AND DIRECTION PROVIDE A WELL-LAID PLAN

"I wish somebody else had found that money," a character laments near the end of A Simple Plan, as pistol shots reverberate through the winter woods and a pair of fresh corpses lay sprawled at his feet. It's a moment of beautiful understatement, one that perfectly encapsulates the spare, elegiac spirit of this mesmerizing morality parable.

True to its name, Plan (adapted by Scott B. Smith from his own novel) begins simply enough: Small-town feed-store clerk Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), roaming a New England forest with his dim-bulb brother Jacob (an unrecognizable Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob's beer-guzzling buddy Lou (Brent Briscoe), stumbles upon a downed aircraft. Though the pilot has long since been ravaged by the frost and crows, the $4.4 million stashed in the plane's cargo remains untouched. Jacob and Lou are quick to claim the loot; Hank, clinging to virtue (or is it fear?), chides them and only reluctantly does he agree to harbor the bounty at his home until the thaw, at which point the cash will be divided among the three. "But," he threatens, "If anybody comes looking for [the money] before spring, I burn it. That's it."

Yet his admonition arrives too late; Hank has already consented to this simple plan, and it is here that the film begins to move, with inexorable, logical momentum, towards tragedy. Hank's pregnant wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), initially balks at her husband's scheme, but before you can say Lady Macbeth, she begins to fine-tune the strings of his plot; Jacob commits several idiotic errors, fraying Hank's patience; and amid mounting suspicions, the co-conspirators soon collude with and against one another. Crows caw; allegiances shift; snow falls; the body count rises.

Among the many beauties of A Simple Plan is its structural clarity: The action surges forward with unstoppable (and utterly rational) velocity, as Hank et al. entrap themselves in a web of deception and murder. The story's corkscrew twists, which might be lethally convoluted in the hands of a Tarantino or the brothers Coen, are handled with wrenching restraint by director Sam Raimi, whose previous oeuvre (including Darkman and The Quick and the Dead) suggests no capacity for such dexterity. So convincingly has Raimi steeped his film in the vagaries of quotidian life that the infrequent (but inevitable) explosions of mayhem generate terror of almost surreal proportions-how ironic that a helmer once synonymous with the slasher genre has reawakened audiences to the inhumanity of violence.

A Simple Plan functions on multiple levels-it is a full-blooded thriller, a mournful family drama and, at times, mordantly comic. Danny Elfman's contemplative score and the ravishing, picturesque cinematography by Alar Kivilo enhance the film's rich texture; not since The Sweet Hereafter have a movie's collaborators so effectively communicated an atmosphere of wintry malaise.

Raimi has enlisted a cache of formidable on-screen performers who wisely avoid the pitfalls of histrionics. The superb Paxton is well-served by his vanilla demeanor, while Fonda imbues her conniving spouse role with depth and dimension. The flawless supporting cast features impeccable work from Briscoe (U-Turn) and Gary Cole (of the Raimi-produced television chiller American Gothic) as an is-he-or-isn't-he FBI agent. But the most indelible performance in A Simple Plan comes courtesy of Thornton (Sling Blade), whose telling gaze and melancholy smile belie Jacob's lonely history.

"Do you feel evil?" he murmurs midway through the film, addressing the camera, his brother behind him.

With a shudder, we realize that we do.