By Clarisse Loughrey

Copyright independent

Paul Greengrass, journalist-turned-director, has spent a lifetime navigating the space between truth and cinema. When he turned his hand at the Bourne series – for Supremacy (2004), Ultimatum (2007), and Jason Bourne (2016) – he lent them all their bare-knuckled weight and credibility; yet with every recreation of true-life tragedy he’s made, from Captain Phillips (2013) to 22 July (2018), we’re sucked back into the same conversation. At what point does the commitment to immersion, to the hope of startling an audience with the force of living history, teeter into pure exploitation?

His latest, The Lost Bus, does little to answer that question. The film has an urgent drive to its depiction of the 2018 Camp Fire that swept northern California’s Butte County, the deadliest in the state’s history. It’s not only a vivid reminder of where wilful inaction in the face of climate change has left us, but of where the blame lies in this particular instance – PG&E, or the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, whose poor maintenance of its power lines caused the initial spark.

Matthew McConaughey plays bus driver Kevin McKay, who saved 22 stranded primary school students from the town of Paradise (and, yes, the film is practically salivating over the irony there) by navigating a 30-mile, five-hour odyssey to break free of the smoke and flames. America Ferrera plays Mary Ludwig, one of the two teachers on the bus (the second declined to be included in the film) who soothed these terrified kids and kept alive their hope.

Unsurprisingly, Greengrass depicts the wild, unpredictable path of the fire with a frightening intensity. There’s no time to think in these situations. All you can do is run. Cars ram into each other. A man engulfed by flames is tackled to the ground with a blanket. Desperate locals wade into the creek, knowing they’ve lost their chance to escape. Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s swooping shots from the fire’s perspective, as it licks up dried grass, sit on the border of gimmicky. But with Greengrass elsewhere relying heavily on practical effects, the cumulative effect is still harrowing. It really is like watching the opening of the mouth of hell.

Yet here’s where all that sober cinéma-vérité slips into the Backdraft/Towering Inferno/pure Hollywood realm of disaster cinema: Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby have taken Kevin’s real-life circumstances (quite inspiring on paper: he was a longtime Walgreens employee who quit to pursue an education degree, driving buses on the side) and tossed it out in favour of a near-farcical amount of misery. That, in turn, lets them pull off a redemption story where McConaughey eschews his Hollywood glitz for a scraggly beard and tattoos.

This Kevin, as he mutters to himself, “can’t seem to catch a break”. He’s back, tail between his legs, from a failed attempt to “make it” in Reno, with an ailing mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey), a bitter ex-wife, and a son who hates him (Levi McConaughey; that these characters are played by the actor’s actual son and mother makes no tangible difference). The dispatcher (Ashlie Atkinson) won’t give him any extra shifts. His dog has terminal cancer. So, McConaughey squeezes out a few of those trademark, racked sobs of his – and, certainly, he’s at least well positioned to offer the character his twitchy rawness, contrasted nicely with Ferrera’s strength and reassurance.

All that bad luck only intensifies once the disaster starts, so that we reach the point where a looter, waving around his gun, is yelling “Give us the bus!” like he’s one of Al Capone’s minions. The Lost Bus traps us in that disorientating push and pull – it’s a little too real to entertain, and a little too entertaining to feel real.

Dir: Paul Greengrass. Starring: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson. Cert 15, 130 minutes.

‘The Lost Bus’ streams on Apple TV+ from 3 October