Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus was probably the one of the biggest surprises that I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. At the very least I was expecting it to be a decent survival thriller. What I was not expecting was a surprisingly emotional, anxiety inducing ride that had me on the verge of tears for nearly two hours. Naturally, you put children in a dangerous situation where they are crying for their parents and asking if they are going to die, I will get emotional. But, The Lost Bus is not only emotional, but executes this real life story with thrilling precision.
We follow Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a bus driver for Paradise Independent School District in Paradise, California. He starts off his day like any other, taking kids to school, running some errands and performing routine maintenance on his trusty old school bus. However, this day a wildfire sparks several miles outside the city and begins spreading rapidly. During the evacuation efforts several school children are left stranded at a local elementary school and require a school bus to evacuate them. With the wildfire rapidly approaching the school, Kevin takes up the jobs and what unfolds is an ultimate tale for survival.
The Lost Bus is at its absolute best when it leans into being a survival thriller. From the very first moment the kids step onto that school bus to the breathless final minutes, the film grips you in a vise of tension, rarely offering a chance to exhale. The terror is relentless. Whether it’s the image of the bus surrounded on all sides by an unforgiving wall of fire devouring everything in its path, the piercing screams of children who know they are trapped, or the two adults who slowly come to the horrifying realization that unless they act, they too are going to die in the most nightmarish way imaginable. Greengrass turns these moments into pure cinematic panic, using his signature documentary-style filmmaking to pull you into the inferno. Every crackle of flame, every gasp of smoke-filled breath, every shudder of the bus is amplified by sound design and VFX that feel terrifyingly real. You may be safe in your theater seat, but you will not feel safe. I certainly didn’t and neither did my fellow critics with me, all of us shifting, fidgeting, unable to sit still, as if the fire might somehow leap from the screen and swallow us whole.
However, despite all of this praise, the film does stumble with one unfortunate hiccup: it tries to wedge in a family drama subplot involving Kevin, his wife, and their son. The idea seems to be that none of them are able to articulate their feelings to one another, which is meant to add another layer of tension, but instead it plays out like boilerplate domestic conflict we’ve seen countless times before. These are the kinds of “typical family problems” that might work in a different story, but here they feel clumsy and unnecessary, especially when the survival narrative is so much stronger on its own. The result is a tonal detour that only drags the pacing down and distracts from the urgency of the central disaster. Honestly, if the film had resisted the urge to shoehorn in this melodrama, it would have been sitting comfortably at an A.
Overall, Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus is a nerve-shredding and deeply emotional survival thriller that demands to be experienced on the big screen. It’s not flawless, but when it locks into its harrowing momentum, it is both exhilarating and devastating in equal measure. Imperfections aside, it’s a ride well worth taking, especially in a theater where every crackle of fire and every scream will rattle through you.
My Rating: A-
In select theaters September 19th. Available AppleTV+ on October 3rd.
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