The 2018 Camp Fire became the deadliest wildfire in California history, killing 85 people and destroying the town of Paradise in a matter of hours. It’s the kind of disaster that can numb you when reduced to statistics—too enormous to fully process. Then along comes Paul Greengrass, a director who has spent decades making incomprehensible moments in history visceral. From Bloody Sunday to United 93 to Captain Phillips, he specializes in placing audiences inside impossible situations until watching becomes almost unbearable. The Lost Bus continues that tradition, adapting Lizzie Johnson‘s book “Paradise” into a white-knuckle survival story about a school bus driver and a teacher fighting to keep 22 children alive as flames close in from every direction.

Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey, Mud, returning to features for the first time since 2019) is a bus driver with a complicated relationship to responsibility. He’s been working to make better choices, particularly for his estranged son Shaun and his disabled mother, but old wounds don’t heal easily. When the fire erupts, Kevin is about to evacuate his family when he receives a call: there are children stranded at a school and they need a bus. What makes someone answer that call instead of saving the people he loves? The film doesn’t moralize about the choice—it just watches him make it. Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Barbie) is the teacher already on the bus, and together they navigate roads swallowed by smoke and walls of fire that seem to have minds of their own.

Greengrass excels at these propulsive recreations of heart-stopping events, and for most of its runtime, The Lost Bus is exactly that—breathless and uncomfortably close. I caught the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in a theater that was hot and overly crowded, and the claustrophobia felt intentional even when it wasn’t. Cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth (Handling the Undead, The Burning Sea) knows how to shoot nature at its most punishing, collaborating with Greengrass to create a sustained sense of dread as the fire grows more unpredictable. The editing from Peter M. Dudgeon, William Goldenberg, and Paul Rubell keeps the geography legible even when chaos reigns—no small feat when the bus is trapped behind shifting walls of flame. The always reliable James Newton Howard contributes a score that underlines the heroism without overstating it.

McConaughey and Ferrera both deliver committed performances, their chemistry with each other and the children preventing the film from tipping into overwrought sentimentality. McConaughey sells emotional investment with the best of them, and he’s such a family man that you believe he’d step up and put himself on the line for these children. Supporting players Ashlie Atkinson (Bridge of Spies) and the always underrated Yul Vazquez (Books of Blood) find moments to shine as first responders coordinating rescue efforts.

Where The Lost Bus stumbles is in the dramatic inserts between the intensity. McConaughey’s real-life son Levi plays his on-screen son, and his mother Kay appears as Kevin’s mother, but these family scenes feel shoehorned in for dramatic purposes rather than emerging organically from character. Kevin’s strained relationship with Shaun keeps pulling focus from the bus when we want to stay on it. It’s a familiar Greengrass issue—he can stage chaos better than almost anyone working today, but the connective tissue sometimes gets shortchanged.

Producers Jamie Lee Curtis (Freakier Friday) and Jason Blum (M3GAN 2.0) shepherded this passion project to the screen, adapting a story where one of the real-life teachers asked not to be depicted, resulting in the two characters being combined into Mary. That streamlining works in the film’s favor, keeping things focused on the partnership between two people who didn’t wake up expecting to be heroes. The Lost Bus honors the bravery of first responders and ordinary residents who stepped up when it mattered most, treating the Camp Fire as the individual catastrophe it was rather than just another entry in a grim recurring headline.