The Lost Bus (dir. Paul Greengrass)

by Jack Martin | Oct 3, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 130 mins

UK Distributor: Apple TV+

UK Release Date: 3 October 2025

WHO’S IN THE LOST BUS?

Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vasquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Spencer Watson, Danny McCarthy, Kimberli Flores, Levi McConaughey, Kay McCabe McConaughey, Kate Wharton

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Paul Greengrass (director, writer), Brad Inglesby (writer, producer), Jason Blum, Jamie Lee Curtis and Gregory Goodman (producers), James Newton Howard (composer), Pål Ulvik Rokseth (cinematographer), Peter M. Dudgeon, William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A bus driver (McConaughey) rescues a classroom from a destructive wildfire…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE LOST BUS?

In January of this year, the world watched in horror as a series of wildfires spread across Southern California and briefly turned the Los Angeles and San Diego areas into scenes out of a post-apocalyptic horror, destroying countless homes and sadly killing more than a dozen people. Although wildfires, even ones of such magnitude, are far from a rare occurrence in the famously warm and dry Californian climate, there was something about seeing the flames make their way to the seemingly safer parts of the state – where many of Hollywood’s biggest players happen to live – that struck a chord with the wider world, waking them up to the shocking realities that most California residents have to deal with these natural life-threatening occurrences on an all-too regular basis.

The timing of director Paul Greengrass’s natural disaster thriller The Lost Bus therefore could not be more tragically perfect. While it was shot well before the fires were even ignited, its release mere months after the fact puts it directly in the public consciousness, and with a filmmaker like Greengrass who’s known for adding harrowing immediacy to his dramatised depictions of real-life events, a film like this could potentially strike a truly profound chord with audiences, especially those directly affected by this year’s inferno.

What we get, though, is a fairly straightforward disaster movie. A good one, mind you, but a somewhat paint-by-numbers example that feels too much of a need to fall back on generic tropes for it to form any real connection.

Taking place in November 2018, the film follows California school bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), whose life appears to be one piece of misery after another. He’s stuck in a dead-end job, separated from his wife Linda (Kimberli Flores), caring for his ailing mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey, his real-life mother) in their childhood home that he reluctantly returned to after the death of his abusive father, raising his moody teenage son Shaun (Levi McConaughey, his real-life son) who says upfront that he hates him, and he’s even having to put down his ailing dog when its cancer spreads. Then, just as things seem like they couldn’t get worse for this guy, a fire breaks out from a faulty electrical tower which gets bigger and bigger, and thanks to strong winds begins spreading all over the area, including the highly populated town of Paradise. However, Kevin leaps at a chance for personal redemption when he answers the call to pick up a group of schoolchildren with no other means of evacuating themselves from the approaching fire, and along with their teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) he drives them through the utter carnage towards safety.

In true Greengrass fashion, The Lost Bus adopts a borderline docudrama approach to depicting the 2018 fires – which are on record as the deadliest in California’s history with 85 confirmed fatalities – with archive footage of the actual inferno spliced with naturalistically performed scenes of firefighters and other authority figures clamouring to eradicate the powerful flames. There are times when this works very well, especially when we get up nice and close (but not too close because, to quote Frankenstein’s Monster, “fire bad!”) to what looks like Hell making its fiery way through neighbourhoods, roads, various corners of wildlife, and just about anything in its path, which the director shoots with an intensity that almost makes you feel the heat through the screen you’re watching it on. You definitely feel the scope of these fires as they spread endlessly across and over this region, which despite some noticeable CGI that briefly takes you out of the pandemonium are depicted as genuinely frightening, almost like a serial killer with abnormal supernatural powers.

However, when applied to the much more Hollywood-ised narrative that Greengrass and co-writer Brad Inglesby have chosen to focus on, the effect can’t quite mask the generic disaster movie cheese. While there are some very good performances by the likes of McConaughey and Ferrera, who each bring some tenderness to their unlikely hero roles, the characters themselves fit the standard protagonist mould, with McConaughey in particular going through such melancholic agony before the fires even start, which feel like they’re there so that the audience has some reason to root for him or emotionally connect with him, that it sometimes borders on overkill. It’s also a disaster movie that provides exposition at every available opportunity and sacrifices character development for statistical information about the ongoing event, leaving those like Yul Vasquez as Cal Fire team leader Ray Martinez as little more than a vessel for Greengrass’s extensive research and not much else. The addition of terrified schoolchildren and their concerned weeping parents also adds some easy albeit understandable sentiment.

It all feels too much like a movie, which is weird to say because, well, that’s exactly what The Lost Bus is. But there’s something about the way it’s written and executed, with tender monologues and numerous drone shots flying over CGI flames, that rob it of its authenticity, regardless of how well-meaning it may be. While it definitely provides a stressful and certainly emotional experience at times, it always seems as though much more could’ve been done to elevate this material beyond the familiar disaster movie template, especially coming so soon after yet another Californian nightmare. That being said, it’s a decent enough film, just not the true trailblazer it could have been.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Lost Bus is a decent if generic disaster movie that sees Paul Greengrass apply an intense immediacy to his depiction of the 2018 California fires, but a noticeably Hollywood-ised narrative sees much of its authenticity go up in smoke.