Mid­night Family

A police radio reveals an inci­dent. Sev­en­teen-year-old ambu­lance dri­ver Juan Ochoa’s eyes widen and, with­in sec­onds, he’s flicked the switch on his makeshift siren, slammed the ambulance’s gear­stick into place, floored the gas ped­al, and is hurtling into the night. As the title card of Mid­night Fam­i­ly reveals, Mex­i­co City has just 45 gov­ern­ment-run ambu­lances cater­ing for a pop­u­la­tion of nine million.

As a result, an ​“infor­mal indus­try” of com­mer­cial­ly oper­at­ed res­cue vehi­cles has emerged to fill in. Com­pe­ti­tion for clients is stiff, which means act­ing fast is crit­i­cal. But career­ing into cri­sis sit­u­a­tions doesn’t leave much space for eth­i­cal
con­sid­er­a­tion; things get messy when health­care and busi­ness mix.

“This ambu­lance feeds us, so stop fuck­ing around,” Juan says to his father, Fer. Luke Lorentzen’s sharply focused first fea­ture – tight­ly edit­ed and beau­ti­ful­ly shot by the direc­tor – depicts the strug­gles the Ochoas face in try­ing to keep their busi­ness afloat. Track­ing a series of tricky ambu­lance oper­a­tions, and shot most­ly from inside vehi­cles, the film does a great job of unpick­ing the nuances of this com­plex sit­u­a­tion with­out resort­ing to spelling things out.

It dis­plays the thorny deci­sions that the fam­i­ly face, but also the sur­round­ing socioe­co­nom­ic fac­tors that inform them. Beyond the tech­ni­cal demands every oper­a­tion makes – need­ing clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion, a calm dis­po­si­tion, instinc­tive deci­sion-mak­ing, and a god-lev­el abil­i­ty to weave through oncom­ing traf­fic – every pick­up that doesn’t pay out still incurs costs (gas, equip­ment, med­ical sup­plies, police bribes, etc).

In one res­cue, a woman pass­es away before she can reach the treat­ment cen­tre. Fer still asks the woman’s griev­ing moth­er if she can cov­er his costs for the trip. Com­pli­cat­ing this trans­ac­tion fur­ther is the sug­ges­tion that the hos­pi­tal the Ochoas drove her to wasn’t the near­est, or nec­es­sar­i­ly even the best, but the one from which they would have prof­it­ed most. Every action is weight­ed against another.