Critic Reviews

Midnight 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.

This 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."

Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this.

To 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.

It’s a very exciting, sad, yet extremely funny film.

An acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary.

Captured 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.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

A 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.

It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.