On The Day The School Bus Left Us
2020 · 15m
Directed by Ashley Manugas
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Oona and Tris, two girls raised by single mothers, conspire to hide a dangerous secret after their school bus leaves them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise feels like it's reaching for dark-coming-of-age thunder but lands in familiar YA territory—two girls, a secret, moral ambiguity we've seen weaponized a hundred times. Unless Manugas does something genuinely perverse with the setup, this reads as competent rather than subversive.
A taut structural exercise in withholding and tension; the film positions itself squarely in the lineage of intimate psychological dramas about adolescent complicity, and the 15-minute constraint forces real discipline in how information is parceled out.
What sells this is almost certainly a single moment—the precise beat where one girl's resolve cracks, or a sound design choice that makes the bus's departure feel like a closing door rather than a plot device—and Manugas trusts that micro-decision enough to build the whole film's weight on it.