The Lost Bus
In Paul Greengrass’s riveting, terrifying real-life thriller, Matthew McConaughey plays a man who steers a busload of 22 schoolchildren through a raging Californian inferno.
Under fire: America Ferrera and Matthew McConuaghey
Image courtesy of Altitude Film Distribution/Apple TV+.
It was the populist filmmaker Ron Howard who brought us the harrowing documentary Rebuilding Paradise (2020). Now the former current affairs documentarian Paul Greengrass gives a dramatic reading of the real-life tragedy that was the so-called ‘2018 Camp Fire’, the deadliest wildfire in the history of California. With both films’ use of genuine footage, it’s sometimes hard to separate the real from the re-enacted. Here, Greengrass and his co-scenarist Brad Ingelsby focus on one episode and one character, Kevin McKay, a bus driver who at the time thought his life could hardly get any worse. McKay (a grizzled, heavily tattooed Matthew McConaughey) has just had the row to end all rows with his 15-year-old son Shaun (Levi McConaughey), is struggling to meet the medical bills of his late father and has just taken his dog to the vet to be put down. There is nobody in his life to support him emotionally and even his boss at the bus depot is beginning to lose patience with his domestic excuses. McKay, fighting to keep his head above water like so many Americans today, really is struggling to make ends meet.
On one level, The Lost Bus is a gritty character study of a real man who is nicely counterpointed here by the second-grade teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), who believes in rationale, total calm and following her life by the book. Meanwhile, there are forces greater than mankind raging against the Californian hills precipitated by the devastating effects of climate change. Opening the film with a shot of a scorching, unforgiving sun and the dusty, smouldering undergrowth around the treacherous hills of Paradise, California, Paul Greengrass neatly draws the viewer into his depiction of hell on Earth. With high winds battering the community and tempers fraying, catastrophe is just minutes away. Then a power line belonging to Pacific Gas and Electric is blown off its moorings and ignites an inferno of Promethean proportions. Drawing on his experience as a documentarian, Greengrass brings a hand-held urgency to the action, augmented by genuine film footage and knee-weakening CGI. In a narrative choked with horror and emotion, perhaps the key sentence belongs to the Cal Fire chief Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez) when, addressing the press corps, he culminates his briefing with the words, “we’re being damn fools – and that’s the truth.” In short, things can only get worse.
In the event, McKay ended up scooping up 22 terrified school children and their teacher and taking the law into his own hands to save the lot of them. Unlike Mary Ludwig, wildfires do not play by the book and will burn anything in their path, be they the elderly or the very, very young – if smoke inhalation doesn’t kill them first. After Paradise there was Santa Monica, Malibu and Pasadena in 2024, but in this particular inferno drivers were incinerated in their cars while stuck in gridlocked roads, 13,500 homes were destroyed and 85 lives lost. In the 1970s, Irwin Allen got rich producing disaster movies. Now we will be seeing more and more films based on real ‘natural’ disasters, disasters we have yet to begin to imagine.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Levi McConaughey, Kay McCabe McConaughey, Kate Wharton, Danny McCarthy, Nathan Gariety.
Dir Paul Greengrass, Pro Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Blum, Brad Ingelsby and Gregory Goodman, Screenplay Brad Ingelsby and Paul Greengrass, Ph Pal Ulvik Rokseth, Pro Des David Crank, Ed Peter M. Dudgeon, William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell, Music James Newton Howard, Costumes Mark Bridges, Sound Oliver Tarney.
Apple Studios/Blumhouse Productions/Comet Films-Altitude Film Distribution/Apple TV+.
129 mins. USA. 2025. US Rel: 3 October 2025. UK Rel: 4 October 2025. Cert. 15.
