Medias Res Review: 83 Minutes of Funny, Stylish Indie Neo-Noir

Five minutes into Medias Res, Dave Meeks is trying to sell something to strangers who decided against it before he opened his mouth, and he is doing it with the total sincerity of a man who has never once considered that the pitch might be the problem. I laughed, and then I settled in. A film that can build a joke out of character that early usually knows what it is doing.

Edwin F. Gonzalez directs, co-writes with his lead Mike Delaney, and shoots the picture himself. Across eighty-three minutes that single sensibility shows, in the grade, in the framing, and in a willingness to let scenes sit longer than most independent crime films would dare. Once, somewhere in the middle, that willingness nearly lost me. I will come back to it.

Medias Res opens its trunk sixteen minutes in (Spoiler Warning)

Dave (Delaney) owes money to Joe (Joseph Mason), and the repayment plan is thirty days of service whatever Joe decides. Joe robs. Dave waits at the wheel with his conscience on mute, waiting for an escape. The film treats this arrangement as ordinary, almost domestic, which is a quietly interesting choice for a crime picture.

Sixteen minutes in, the two of them lift a car from the moneyed streets of White Creek and find an actress inside the trunk. The reveal is handled well. Gonzalez plays it straight and lets the discovery carry itself, and it is the moment the film stops being a story about two men killing time in a parked car.

What follows involves drugs, gangs, and a chain of betrayals that keeps rearranging your sense of who is actually running things. I am not spoiling a frame of it.

Mike Delaney and Joseph Mason are the reason it holds

Delaney gives Dave a permanent apology in his posture, the walk of a man who has spent years losing arguments with people he loves. He is also very funny, and he never once winks at the camera while being it. That combination is hard to write and harder to play, and Delaney wrote himself the part, which makes the lack of vanity in it worth noting.

Joseph Mason is the engine. His Joe has appetite, a plan, and a spectacular blind spot where consequence should live, and Mason plays all three with a lightness that keeps you fond of him while he wrecks things. The two actors genuinely listen to each other, which is rarer on screen than it sounds. Their scenes in that car are where the film breathes.

Sarah Coykendall’s Summer Hayes arrives as the hinge the story has been waiting for, and everything sharpens the moment she is in the frame.

The color and camerawork punch above the budget

Gonzalez shooting his own film turns out to be the production’s quiet advantage. One sensibility, one eye, one clear idea of what this world should look like. The grade is deliberate, interiors are allowed to keep their shadows, and the compositions carry the patience of someone who knows exactly what a neo-noir is supposed to feel like.

At this level of financing, that is a real achievement. I have watched a lot of independent crime films that light a room flat and hope the plot carries the frame. This one wants to be looked at, and it earns the attention.

Where Medias Res tests your patience

My reservations live in the middle. Once the trunk is open, the film settles into a long run of conversation and the temperature drops back roughly to where it was before the reveal. That stretch is the only place my attention drifted, and it is the only complaint I have.

All of it is fixable, so I want to be specific.

1. Let the reveal change the next ten minutes. The discovery lands. The scenes right after it could carry visible aftershocks in how Dave and Joe move, argue and avoid each other, which would keep that tension banked instead of spending it in one go.
2. Move a little consequence earlier. The back half is excellent at making the past catch up with these two. One fragment of that pressure, planted in the middle, would pull the whole stretch forward.
3. Let the cutting move faster than the camera. The compositions are patient by design. When the edit keeps pace with that patience beat for beat, the film reads slower than it actually is.
4. The two tones work best stacked. Comedy and menace take turns here. The handful of scenes where they overlap are the finest in the movie, and that overlap is where this team’s voice actually lives.

The second half is where Medias Res lands

Somewhere around the midpoint the film changes gear. The action arrives, consequences start catching up with both men, and the story turns genuinely unorthodox in ways I did not see coming. Everything the first half quietly stacked gets spent here, and spent well.

This is the half that earns the film its audience. Crime, comedy, thriller, character drama, there is something in it for most genre appetites, and it moves with enough confidence to make the slower middle read as a deliberate build.

Verdict: worth finishing

Medias Res hooked me in five minutes, tested me somewhere around thirty, and paid me back across its final half hour. Three out of five. The missing two points are for that middle stretch and nothing else. The performances, the photography, the humor and the back-half plotting all come from filmmakers working with far less money than their ambition requires, and getting a great deal out of it.

You can watch Medias Res on Prime Video. Give it the middle twenty minutes. I am looking forward to whatever Gonzalez and Delaney do next.