Matthew McConaughey steers a white-knuckle wildfire drama in ‘The Lost Bus’

America Ferrara and Matthew McConaughey in a scene from “The Lost Bus” (Apple TV)

On Nov. 8, 2018, as the Camp Fire tore through Paradise, California, killing 85 people, a school bus driver was sent to evacuate 22 elementary students. What began as a simple task became a five-hour fight for survival.

It’s this ordeal dramatized in The Lost Bus, opening in select theaters Friday before streaming on Apple TV+ Oct. 3. Adapting a real-life tragedy for Hollywood demands balance: tip into melodrama and it feels like TV; too clinical and it resembles a news report. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, Captain Phillips) and co-writer Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown) manage that balance, crafting a tense, moving disaster film.

Matthew McConaughey plays Kevin, the driver. Already burdened with a dying dog, unpaid bills, caring for his mother, and tension with his teenage son (played with restraint by McConaughey’s real-life son Levi), Kevin is not in heroic shape. On his way to deliver medicine, he hears the call: any driver nearby to take 22 kids to safety. His pause before answering — hoping someone else will volunteer — says everything.

Greengrass cuts between Kevin’s fraught morning and first responders struggling with a fire that’s escalating beyond control. From the moment Kevin accepts, dread tightens. The film ratchets higher once the terrified children are on board.

Kevin’s brusque manner makes him an unlikely savior. He insists that teacher Mary (America Ferrera) ride along to manage the kids. He’s no superhero, just a weary man who shows up and does the unthinkable. The script also threads in themes of fathers, regret, and absence, echoing Kevin’s relationship with his late father and his ill son.

As Ferrera and McConaughey steer through walls of flame and falling power lines, the film sometimes recalls Speed. At moments it edges into spectacle — sequences so heightened you wonder if reality has been stretched for thrills, as though the bus had wandered onto a studio backlot. Yet the suspense rarely loosens.

What lingers most is not spectacle but vulnerability: the children’s fear, Kevin’s reluctant resolve, the enormity of nature’s force. Adapted from Lizzie Johnson’s book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, the story could have centered on firefighters. They do get moments here — the fire chief grimly notes these blazes worsen every year — but this is not Only the Brave. Instead, Greengrass zeroes in on ordinary people facing the unimaginable.

Disaster films have long leaned on tropes, but The Lost Bus finds freshness in restraint. It neither sanctifies Kevin nor wallows in spectacle. It asks what survival looks like when the world collapses and no one else is coming.

It’s not hard to draw tears from images of kids in peril, yet the film reaches something deeper: the fragility of human life against forces beyond control. At its heart, The Lost Bus isn’t about fire or heroics, but about endurance — a portrait of flawed, ordinary people caught in catastrophe, holding on for one more mile of road.

[Abridged]

LINDSEY BAHR, MDT/AP Film Writer

“The Lost Bus,” an Apple Original Films release in select theaters Sept. 19 and streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “language.” Running time: 129 minutes.★★★★