Paul Greengrass’s first film for five years is about a bus you definitely wouldn’t want to catch. The Lost Bus transports him and us back to the quasi-disaster-movie style of United 93, his 9/11 movie. It’s about a real-life disaster – 85 people dead, 50,000 evacuated in the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest in California’s history.
In disaster-movie fashion we get to know our hero, the driver of a yellow school bus, on a fairly typical day. Kevin is nearing the end of his tether – can’t seem to get on the right side of bus company management, struggling with a sick mother at home, an estranged wife who hates him, a son who despises him. And then the disaster strikes, as sparks from an overhead power line set off a fire that will run out of control, sweeping through small towns and destroying everything in its path.
The call goes out for a driver, any driver, to go and rescue a class full of stranded children, who will die if no one collects them. Kevin steps up.
The film divides neatly into two halves, with lots of set-up, most of it getting to know Kevin. Useful once the rescue gets underway and Kevin sets off on his mercy dash into and out of the fire zone with his bus full of frightened kids. Because from this point onwards there’s no time to get to know much about anything. It’s all in-your-face experience and Greengrass in frenzied-jeopardy mode, the camera yawing about as fire, smoke, honking traffic, water, guns, falling power lines, looters and explosions all come at “the lost bus”, one problem to surmount after another.
It’s Matthew McConaughey in the driving seat, giving a brilliant performance as a man on the edge who’s worked out early that if he plays it by the book he and his young passengers, plus teacher Miss Ludwig (America Ferrera), will all die. There’s a brilliant scene at the point where Kevin arrives at the school to scoop up the kids, and Miss Ludwig is fannying about doing things the proper way. McConaughey’s face registers all sorts of restrained alarm, like alarm bells heard from a distance, upping the sense of mortal peril in a remarkable instant. Ferrera gets her chance a bit later on, when with a single pause before saying “OK,” she jerks a tear – must be the smoke in the air.
Greengrass has said in interviews that he makes two types of “factual” movie – the “quiet… granular” ones, like Bloody Sunday, or the “movie experience” ones like the Bourne movies. This is in the movie experience column, he says, But in fact the first half is all quiet granularity, methodical, setting out the stall. Though there is one classic movie character already in place to give us an inkling of what’s to come – the shouting fire chief, who delivers bulletins on the fire’s progress every ten minutes or so, for the audience’s benefit. Nice playing by Yul Vazquez as Chief Martinez.
No one says global warming or climate change while the fire rages, though there is a speech towards the end by Chief Martinez nodding in that direction. It is in many respects a very old fashioned film – Greengrass says his shooting style was influenced by John Ford’s Stagecoach. There’s a familiar, Jaws-like structure to the screenplay, by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, a cometh-the-hour, cometh-the-man affair taking the notion of the loser, Kevin is most assuredly one, and giving it a good hard stare.
Authenticity is what Greengrass is chiefly after, though, a “you are there” atmosphere of heat, smoke and confusion, and he uses massive orange filtration, dizzying edits and a panicked soundscape to keep us aware at all times that fire is just over thataway, even if momentarily it can’t be seen. As if to emphasise the fact – though you’d never know unless you read the credits – Kevin’s mother is played by McConaughey’s mother, Kay, Kevin son by McConaughey’s son, Levi.
Greengrass made a few OK features before he broke through by re-deploying the smash-and-grab working methods of the current-affairs documentarian in 2002’s Bloody Sunday. He’s been doing it ever since. There is really no one better at it.
The Lost Bus – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
