In Mexico City's wealthiest neighborhoods, the Ochoa family runs a for-profit ambulance, competing with other unlicensed EMTs for patients in need of urgent care. In this cutthroat industry, they struggle to keep their financial needs from compromising the people in their care.... (Full plot summary below)
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In Mexico City's wealthiest neighborhoods, the Ochoa family runs a for-profit ambulance, competing with other unlicensed EMTs for patients in need of urgent care. In this cutthroat industry, they struggle to keep their financial needs from compromising the people in their care.
Leave your thoughts about Midnight Family.
| TheWrapMonica CastilloMidnight Family is both a compassionate portrait of a working-class family and a frightening ride through a broken healthcare system that risks the lives of both patients and providers like the Ochoa family. |
| RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzThis is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success." |
| VarietyNick SchagerPortraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this. |
| The PlaylistChristian GallichioA thrilling, subjective, portrait of one family’s attempts to navigate the corrupt economy of emergency health care while, also, providing much-needed services for a city desperately in need of EMTs. |
| Slant MagazineChuck BowenIt’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power. |
| Film ThreatLorry KiktaIt’s a very exciting, sad, yet extremely funny film. |
| CineVueJohn BleasdaleAn acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary. |
| The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeCaptured by a camera that frequently rattles against the sides of the hurtling ambulance, the Ochoas’ night-time escapades are electrifying and urgent, doused in strobing emergency lights and powered by adrenaline. |
| The A.V. ClubVikram MurthiTo his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery. |
| The GuardianPeter BradshawSomehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system. |
