‘The Lost Bus’ Review: Paul Greengrass Turns Wildfire Into Suspense (Apple TV+)

Wildfires in California are hardly new, but they’ve grown in both frequency and intensity throughout this century as climate change accelerates. In The Lost Bus, they take on the shape of what in another era might have been called a disaster movie: a catastrophe that places a group of people in mortal danger. Paul Greengrass — director of several Bourne films as well as Captain Phillips, among others — feels like exactly the right filmmaker for this kind of nervous, agitated, tension-filled story. And even if the film leans a bit too heavily on digital effects, it largely confirms that instinct. The film plunges viewers visually and viscerally into the heart of an inferno, forcing them to fight for air and cling to survival alongside its characters.

Set in the late 2010s, the story doesn’t exactly ease the audience in. Matthew McConaughey — also producing, and acting here alongside his own family — stars as Kevin McKay, a man whose life is already engulfed in chaos long before the flames arrive. Having returned to his hometown after his father’s death, Kevin now cares for his wheelchair-bound mother (played by McConaughey’s real-life mother, Kay) while trying to mend a fractured relationship with his teenage son (played by his own son, Levi), who lives with his mother and keeps Kevin at arm’s length.

Kevin works as a school bus driver, ferrying kids every day. On this particular morning, though, everything seems to fall apart at once: the death of his dog, his son sick and cranky, his estranged wife berating him over the phone, his boss snapping at him for being late, and his mother unable to fend for herself. In the middle of that maelstrom, a wildfire begins to tear through Northern California. As firefighters and authorities struggle to contain the blaze and evacuate residents, Kevin ends up with a far greater responsibility than his personal woes: rescuing a group of trapped schoolchildren with his yellow bus.

He’s not alone. A teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), joins him as they attempt to shepherd 22 terrified kids through collapsing trees, burning power lines, gridlocked cars, and mobs of panicked — sometimes violent — strangers. Communication is cut, exits are unclear, and what should be a bright California day becomes a suffocating, apocalyptic night, bathed in an orange haze.

The film’s first half-hour plays more like a family drama than an action thriller. But once the fire takes over, the script shifts gears completely, throwing Kevin, Mary, and the kids into an escalating series of obstacles and choices. Greengrass handles the children with restraint, resisting cheap exploitation of their fear and suffering, while still making their dread palpable. Structurally, the film unfolds as a succession of stages and challenges, echoing classics like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear or William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

The difference, of course, lies in the special effects. Greengrass, with his trademark jittery camera and breathless editing, maintains a relentless tension. But the digital fire surrounding the bus often looks a little too polished, almost videogame-like, breaking the immersion. What keeps the film grounded is the director’s ability — honed in United 93, his most comparable work — to tether spectacle to raw human emotion. The panic of the bus, the desperation of the rescuers, and the sheer unpredictability of the disaster keep the stakes brutally real.

The Lost Bus is based on true events, drawn from Lizzie Johnson’s book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. Paradise, the town at the epicenter of the 2018 blaze, became a tragic symbol of a new reality: communities living on the edge of recurring, climate-fueled disasters. While Greengrass shapes it into a tense survival thriller, the echoes of real life are impossible to ignore. The film may deliver suspense and catharsis, but outside the theater, the lesson is clear — these fires are no longer extraordinary events. They’re the new normal, and they’ll keep coming.