‘The Lost Bus’ review: Paul Greengrass teams with Matthew McConaughey for uneven California wildfire drama

Dir: Paul Greengrass. US. 2025. 130mins

In Paul Greengrass’s heart-pounding survivalist thriller The Lost Bus, a major wildfire breaks out in the hills surrounding Paradise, California and spreads without mercy. Downtrodden bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) is forced to change his route towards home to instead pick up 23 stranded school children and their teacher Mary Ludwick (America Ferrera). Greengrass brings intense precision and immersive camerawork to uneasily dramatize a ripped-from-the-headlines story which is based on real events that happened during the wildfires of 2018.

Greengrass doesn’t tell you how to feel, he’s practically screaming at you

The journalist-turned-filmmaker has often been inspired by tragic reporting, such as the Bogside Massacre in Bloody Sunday, a 9/11 hijacking in United 93, the capture of a container vessel by Somali pirates in Captain Phillips, and a mass shooting in Oslo, Norway, in 22 July. Nevertheless, The Lost Bus didn’t originate with Greengrass. Academy Award winner Jamie Lee Curtis first optioned Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, bringing Greengrass and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby together to craft a potent adaptation that world premieres in Toronto. The result, which will be heading to Apple TV+ on October 3, is probably Greengrass’s most distressing feature and biggest commercial swing yet.

Before The Lost Bus leaps into disaster, it first tries to create human stakes. A worn out Kevin is at the end of his rope: his dad recently passed away; his mother needs home care; he also can’t seem to pick up enough shifts from his finger-wagging supervisor Ruby Bishop (Ashlie Atkinson); his son hates him. As he drives his yellow school bus down these wide dusty California streets, he does so with the world on his mind. 

The area that surrounds him is also hurting. On day 210 of a drought, fire warnings are high and the grass is dry. The latter becomes rich fuel when high winds cause faulty powerlines controlled by the energy company PG&E to rip away, sparking a fire that will begin in Feather River Canyon before consuming 18,000 structures and 153,336 acres. 

Before long, Greengrass turns up the intensity. Kevin learns that his 15-year-old son Sean (Levi McConaughey, the actor’s real life son) is sick and his mother wants him back. As the blaze builds, he must divert his route to pick up the stranded kids. Even when he has them on board, it’s not so easy to leave Paradise; Kevin and Mary must navigate through road blocks, looters and other deadly obstacles toward safety. Before long they become a tight team akin to Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in Speed.   

Never one to allow the drama to simply breathe, Greengrass and DoP Pål Ulvik Rokseth (Burning Sea) reach for his usual bag of tricks: crash zooms to intensify the exhaustive meetings held by Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) and his firefighters, and handheld cameras meant to give a photojournalistic aesthetic. He also includes actual footage from the travesty, adding some edge of realism to a film that relies on heavy visual effects to create a graphically underwhelming hellscape.   

And while the film is arresting and unnerving, in many ways there is very little difference between The Lost Bus and outlandish mainstream disaster flicks like Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Greengrass doesn’t tell you how to feel, he’s practically screaming at you, helped along by composer James Newton Howard’s heavy-handed score. He never trusts the audience to simply identify with the scene or characters. Nor does he trust McConaughey to be a surrogate for those emotions. It’s telling that we learn very few of the children’s names other than Toby (Nathan Gariety), who acts an overt avatar for Kevin’s own broken relationship with his son.  

For every moment The Lost Bus impresses with its scale and craft, there are other instances where it feels like we are watching these screaming kids be dragged through a Disney amusement park ride. And while the film does display some righteous anger, particularly at how energy companies are not being held accountable for wrecking the environment, Greengrass lessens any potential bite in lieu of swooping in and out of flames with popcorn entertainment in mind.