Even before the wildfire has started to rage in fact-based docudrama The Lost Bus, Paul Greengrass has us on edge. We’re inside a schoolbus for the morning drop-off and we’re reminded of the dangers already faced on the day-to-day, young children without seatbelts being driven around the precarious rolling roads of the California hills, the director cranking up every little sound of a vehicle we’re told is in delayed need of a maintenance check. The world is dangerous enough.
That nervy tension soon gets considerably ramped up and then rarely lets up for the next two-plus hours, an exhausting, assaultive experience aiming to both take us back to the horrors of 2018’s historically destructive Camp fire and to show us what Californians have been facing ever since and will bleakly continue to in the future. It’s ruthlessly efficient in that regard, Greengrass employing every technical skill in his well-used toolbox, returning to the subgenre of uncomfortably immersive history he’s previously explored in United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July. It at times has the feeling of a particularly unpleasant theme park ride, one that many viewers might quickly want to get off (do you want to watch a bus of terrified young children scream and cough for two hours?). Before the world premiere at this year’s Toronto film festival, Greengrass told the audience to enjoy it but then added that “enjoy” might not be the right choice of word.
Not that a film about something so devastating should be enjoyable: the fire burned through 13,500 homes and killed 85 people and since then there have been thousands more wildfires in the state, most notably at the start of last year. What The Lost Bus does is show those of us fortunate enough not to have encountered one just how terrifying it must feel, Greengrass allowing the hell of it to swallow up the screen, turning up all available dials for maximum anxiety. It’s a gruelling movie and at times the excess can feel a little numbing, especially when given to us at full force at such length. The smoky confusion of being in the middle of it often makes it hard to focus on what it is we’re seeing and so some of his action scenes have us a little lost, effectively disconcerting but also a tad alienating.
But Greengrass is at least firing on all cylinders as director, unlike his script work with co-writer Brad Ingelsby, best known for Mare of Easttown, his unofficial remake of the infinitely superior BBC series Happy Valley. That show found believable humanity in grounded characters trying to navigate their way through tough circumstances, something that he’s never able to manage here. It’s a technically proficient drama with the dialogue of a daytime soap, characters clumsily revealing exposition like robots (“But your dad died four years ago and you hadn’t spoken to him for over 20 years,” someone says at one point). It’s an otherwise great showcase for Matthew McConaughey as grizzled school bus driver Kevin, and while he might not convince as a 44-year-old (the actor is fully 55), for someone of his status, he’s still able to tap out of the movie star slickness and into the grime of a character actor.
As a fire spreads faster than authorities anticipate, he’s tasked with collecting the remaining schoolchildren whose parents haven’t been able to pick them up, along with their teacher played with a believable balance of soft and strict by America Ferrera, enjoying her deserved post-Barbie bump. But he also has to deal with some clunky family drama – an estranged vomiting son, a judgmental ex-wife, an elderly mother – and the film kicking off with him putting his dog down while begging for shifts to pay for medical bills clues us into an overkill that threatens to undo any important messaging.
We spend most of the film with the bus as a simple evacuation turns into a draining fight for survival – clue’s in the title – but I could have done with more of the angry snippets we see with PG&E, the power company whose shoddy maintenance and convoluted processes led to the initial fire. Lessons could have been learned from Peter Berg’s similarly stress-inducing Deepwater Horizon, which told of the deadly oil spill and, for a blockbuster of such scale, aimed a surprising amount of fury towards the company responsible.
The film is more about the heroism of those involved as well as the hopelessness of fighting a fire that can’t really be fought (at one point the fire chief decides to focus all efforts on saving lives instead). There’s no direct correlation in the film to the impacts of the climate crisis (the chief does briefly remark that more and more of these are happening) but the all-out horror of it all sends a potent message to those outside the state of what’s being faced and what’s still to come. The writing might be disappointingly inelegant but The Lost Bus is forthright and frightening regardless.
