The Lost Bus review – Paul Greengrass wildfire movie is as stressful as you’d expect | Toronto film festival 2025

Even earlier than the wildfire has began to rage in fact-based docudrama The Misplaced Bus, Paul Greengrass has us on edge. We’re inside a schoolbus for the morning drop-off and we’re reminded of the risks already confronted on the day-to-day, younger kids with out seatbelts being pushed across the precarious rolling roads of the California hills, the director cranking up each little sound of a car we’re informed is in delayed want of a upkeep examine. The world is harmful sufficient.That nervy stress quickly will get significantly ramped up after which not often lets up for the following two-plus hours, an exhausting, assaultive expertise aiming to each take us again to the horrors of 2018’s traditionally harmful Camp hearth and to point out us what Californians have been dealing with ever since and can bleakly proceed to sooner or later. It’s ruthlessly environment friendly in that regard, Greengrass using each technical talent in his well-used toolbox, returning to the subgenre of uncomfortably immersive historical past he’s beforehand explored in United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July. It at instances has the sensation of a very disagreeable theme park trip, one which many viewers would possibly rapidly need to get off (do you need to watch a bus of terrified younger kids scream and cough for 2 hours?). Earlier than the world premiere at this yr’s Toronto movie competition, Greengrass informed the viewers to get pleasure from it however then added that “get pleasure from” won’t be the appropriate selection of phrase.Not {that a} movie about one thing so devastating needs to be fulfilling: the fireplace burned by means of 13,500 properties and killed 85 individuals and since then there have been hundreds extra wildfires within the state, most notably at first of final yr. What The Misplaced Bus does is present these of us lucky sufficient to not have encountered one simply how terrifying it should really feel, Greengrass permitting the hell of it to swallow up the display screen, turning up all obtainable dials for optimum nervousness. It’s a gruelling film and at instances the surplus can really feel somewhat numbing, particularly when given to us at full power at such size. The smoky confusion of being in the midst of it typically makes it onerous to give attention to what it’s we’re seeing and so a few of his motion scenes have us somewhat misplaced, successfully disconcerting but in addition a tad alienating.However Greengrass is at the very least firing on all cylinders as director, in contrast to his script work with co-writer Brad Ingelsby, finest identified for Mare of Easttown, his unofficial remake of the infinitely superior BBC collection Comfortable Valley. That present discovered plausible humanity in grounded characters attempting to navigate their manner by means of robust circumstances, one thing that he’s by no means in a position to handle right here. It’s a technically proficient drama with the dialogue of a daytime cleaning soap, characters clumsily revealing exposition like robots (“However your dad died 4 years in the past and also you hadn’t spoken to him for over 20 years,” somebody says at one level). It’s an in any other case nice showcase for Matthew McConaughey as grizzled college bus driver Kevin, and whereas he won’t persuade as a 44-year-old (the actor is totally 55), for somebody of his standing, he’s nonetheless in a position to faucet out of the film star slickness and into the grime of a personality actor.As a fireplace spreads quicker than authorities anticipate, he’s tasked with accumulating the remaining schoolchildren whose mother and father haven’t been in a position to choose them up, together with their instructor performed with a plausible steadiness of sentimental and strict by America Ferrera, having fun with her deserved post-Barbie bump. However he additionally has to cope with some clunky household drama – an estranged vomiting son, a judgmental ex-wife, an aged mom – and the movie kicking off with him placing his canine down whereas begging for shifts to pay for medical payments clues us into an overkill that threatens to undo any necessary messaging.We spend a lot of the movie with the bus as a easy evacuation turns right into a draining struggle for survival – clue’s within the title – however I may have executed with extra of the offended snippets we see with PG&E, the facility firm whose shoddy upkeep and convoluted processes led to the preliminary hearth. Classes may have been realized from Peter Berg’s equally stress-inducing Deepwater Horizon, which informed of the lethal oil spill and, for a blockbuster of such scale, aimed a stunning quantity of fury in the direction of the corporate accountable.The movie is extra in regards to the heroism of these concerned in addition to the hopelessness of combating a fireplace that may’t actually be fought (at one level the fireplace chief decides to focus all efforts on saving lives as an alternative). There’s no direct correlation within the movie to the impacts of the local weather disaster (the chief does briefly comment that an increasing number of of those are taking place) however the all-out horror of all of it sends a potent message to these exterior the state of what’s being confronted and what’s nonetheless to return. The writing could be disappointingly inelegant however The Misplaced Bus is forthright and scary regardless.