Film reviews: The Lost Bus | Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough | Dead of Winter | The Strangers: Chapter 2
Matthew McConaughey is perfectly cast as a down-on-his-luck bus driver trying to save a group of primary school kids from a California wildfire, writes Alistair Harkness
The Lost Bus (15) ★★★★
Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough (18) ★★★★
Dead of Winter (15) ★★★
The Strangers: Chapter 2 ★★
Five years on from his slow-burning western News of the World, Bourne director Paul Greengrass returns with another harrowing, inspired-by-true-events tale in the mode of his politically charged docudramas Bloody Sunday, United 93 and Captain Phillips. Zeroing in on the 2018 Northern California wildfire that destroyed the town of Paradise and remains the deadliest, most destructive blaze in California history, there’s literally nothing slow-burn about The Lost Bus. It’s a real-life disaster movie in which Greengrass’s penchant for kinetic camera work, reportage-style storytelling and rooted-in-reality performances offsets some of the more conventional beats the film occasionally follows as it dramatises local bus driver Kevin McKay’s heroic rescue of 23 primary school kids from the fire.
Played by Matthew McConaughey as a beaten-down divorcee navigating a failed marriage, a tetchy relationship with his teenage son, an elderly mother and a stalled career, Kevin’s backstory is, admittedly, laid on a bit thick (he even has to euthanise his dying dog). McConaughey, though, knows how to play this type of flawed everyman hero well, nailing the character’s can’t-catch-a-break desperation and finding subtle ways to show how this transforms into rule-breaking resilience when trapped with a bunch of kids (and one teacher, nicely played by America Ferrara) in the midst of a blaze that’s burning with biblical fury.
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Greengrass, too, is firing on all cylinders, the action director in him clearly relishing the chance to riff on The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer with perilous scenes of firetrucks and buses inching along precarious roads, the imminent threat of explosion forever ratcheting up the tension. But he also makes the wildfire (caused by defective power lines) a character in its own right with point-of-view shots of it whooshing through the forest, which adds to the immersive quality of the film as we zip between Kevin’s day-from-hell and the fire department’s efforts to combat the escalating disaster in the face of adverse weather conditions and corporate intransigence. Nerve jangling stuff.
A lot of documentaries about cultural figures tend to use the production of a new work as a framing device to explore their subject’s life and career. Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough director Paul Sng could have done this too; his subject, after all, is prolific enough, and he even follows Welsh on tour as he heads out to promote various projects and attend literary events. But Welsh’s determination to explore the hallucinogenic, mind-expanding drug DMT in a Canadian drug therapy clinic on one such tour provides an appropriately outré hook for Sng to dive back into the Trainspotting author’s transgressive, consciousness-expanding body of work.
Up front about not wanting to silence his demons, Welsh is, at first, a little wary of the cult-like vibe of the clinic itself. But he proceeds nonetheless and Sng intercuts scenes of him lying on the floor navigating the experience with shots of him wandering through a gallery of projected images, reflecting on his childhood, his drug use, his fame and more, as if visualising the experience for us. Augmented with readings of his work by the likes of Stephen Graham, Maxine Peake and Liam Neeson, the effect resembles journey-through-the-subconscious plot of Welsh’s coma-themed novel Marabou Stork Nightmares and Welsh himself is an entertaining tour guide through his own life, measured about his experiences in a way that resists sensationalism.
He’s a little bit blasé about his writing, and yet there’s also a lot of truth to what he says about accruing life experience and just getting on with it — and, actually, he does end up giving away plenty of throwaway insights into his “process” that Sng smartly organises into sections showing how his life and art intersect.
Emma Thompson reveals a gnarlier side in Dead of Winter, a snowbound thriller set in Minnesota and revolving around a widow (Thompson) who becomes embroiled in a kidnapping plot while on an ice-fishing pilgrimage to honour her late husband. The reasons for the kidnapping are pretty macabre, but as Thompson tries to help the young abductee escape from her captors (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca) the battle for survival that ensues is pleasingly attuned to the reality of both the freezing conditions and the physical capacities of all involved. Sentimental flashbacks stop this being the lean, mean, propulsive thriller it could have been, but Thompson — accent in full Fargo mode — keeps it compelling.
“Does there have to be a why?” asks a character late on in The Strangers Chapter 2. It’s a good question that the makers of this rebooted horror franchise should have asked themselves. Where the 2008 original (upon which last year’s reboot and this sequel are based) was terrifying precisely because it didn’t explain the motivations of the masked maniacs conducting random home invasions on unsuspecting couples, this new film comes loaded with backstories and flashbacks in a concept-negating attempt to explain its killers’ origins. Directed by former action A-lister Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2), it’s pretty pointless.
The Lost Bus is on selected release in Scottish cinemas from 26 September and available on Apple TV+ on 3 October; Irvine Welsh: Reality is Not Enough, Dead of Winter and The Strangers: Chapter 2 are in cinemas from 26 September
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