Apple TV+ continues its film slate for 2025 with the America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey-fronted The Lost Bus. Based on a true story as recounted in the book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson.
Directed by Paul Greengrass and co-written by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, The Lost Bus has been brought to the screen as a survival drama. Set during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire. In the film, bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) is having a rough day.
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His son is sick, home from school, and instead of showing him some empathy, he’s determined to believe that he is just trying to skip school. Then, he receives a call from his mother, and it’s clear that his son is ill, and Kevin needs to return home to take care of him.
The Lost Bus is a “true story” that could still happen today.
Only a quickly spreading wildfire is proving to be unstoppable. Scared for his family, Kevin decides to answer the call from dispatch looking for a driver, any driver, to evacuate 20 kids from a local school and get them to the emergency area, reuniting them with their parents. Worried about his own family, Kevin requests that the students’ teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), come with him.
Director Paul Greengrass takes time to build up the gravity of their situation. What starts as a clear sky begins to morph to ash, and the anxiety pushing Kevin to move quickly shifts from wanting to get home to his son to wanting to save the children in his care, while also hoping his loved ones have made it to safety. With a lot of time spent in the bust, Greengrass develops the world around it as best he can. The reflection in windows, the swelling darkness, people in the road.
To accompany the growing dread as the group tries to reach safety, a cast including Yul Vasquez, Ashlie Atkinson, and Spencer Watson all showcase the terror of those who are not safe in The Lost Bus. Dispatch’s communications have gone down, and police radios aren’t faring any better; no one knows what’s happening.
The Lost Bus captures the lack of communication well, and ultimately, the terror and tension aren’t always ramping up as the flames engulf; it’s also just the worry on the ground. It’s the parents hoping their children will make it in, or the guilt that the dispatcher feels for assigning Kevin the call with no way to guide him to safety, now that the evacuation route has been burnt to a crisp.
The drama on screen intensifies as time passes, and the cinematography captures it beautifully. Visually, The Lost Bus is a distinctive film, and the simplicity of the story carries it farther than you would expect. Still, where a movie like The Last Breath, which is a similar survival drama, offers a large sweeping cold in the wide open deep sea, the collapsing heat of the wildfire creates a claustrophobic feel even when outside the bus once the film hits its midpoint.
But for all of its visual success, The Lost Bus is still a run-of-the-mill “based on a true story” drama. We know it will throw our characters into peril, and they’ll end up on the other side of it. I mean, no one would make a film about an event where a bus full of children perished. The basic nature of the script and situation doesn’t offer too much, but that just means that your enjoyment of the film comes directly from how much you enjoy these kinds of films.
America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey keep the film engaging.
Still, America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey are the heart of the film, and they carry it across the finish line despite the paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling. Both actors can raise the stakes in how they talk to each other and how they interact with the children. When they let the students see the panic, that’s when the audience knows how terrifying the situation is.
The Lost Bus doesn’t hit “gripping” as much as you would expect because the writing is on the walls from the moment the bus takes off. Still, the performances, production design, and cinematography all make the most of what is essentially one location, and the feel-good payoff hits just right for the genre.
The Lost Bus is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+ now.
