LOS FRIKIS - Mark Reviews Movies

Los Frikis, Falling Foward Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 2, 2025

Poverty can make people do what they otherwise wouldn't, and youthful naïveté and a lack of information can make them do the seemingly unthinkable. Los Frikis is based on a true story, in which up to several hundred people intentionally infected themselves with HIV during an economic crisis in Cuba. The thinking behind the scheme was twofold: Those with the disease were kept at sanitoriums across the country, where they were provided necessary medications and food, and since the illness had been in the public eye for about ten years, those who did infect themselves believed it would only be about a decade for a cure to be found.

History, of course, tells us two things: The first, generally, is that the good times cannot last, and the second, more specifically, is that there is still not a proven cure to HIV or AIDS. Co-writers/co-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz's movie, then, seems as if it's a tragedy from the moment the idea is proposed. Instead, it's a strange and aimless tale about people slowly dying to an awful disease around a young man who falls in love with the pretty nurse in charge of the sanatorium.

From all of the angles Nilson and Schwartz could have approached this story, this feels like the least convincing or compelling one. For one thing, Gustavo (Eros de la Puente), the young man who becomes enamored with the nurse, does not have HIV or AIDS. In theory, he never will, either, because Gustavo, the more-liked of two orphaned brothers living with extended family, has faked his diagnosis.

He is free of the physical pain and anguish of his immune system and body deteriorating from the disease, also making him free to eventually have lots of spontaneous, passionate, and unprotected sex with Maria (Adria Arjona). She's the nurse, who probably should have second thoughts about a younger man who would lie about having a then-terminal diagnosis. Because the movie pushes a vague sentiment about living life in the moment and to the fullest, she doesn't even seem to have a first thought on the subject. Gustavo and Maria must fall for each other, simply because that's the story the filmmakers want to tell.

The rest of the story feels just as shallow. We meet Gustavo and his older brother Paco (Héctor Medina), a troublemaker and a member of the eponymous subculture of early 1990s Cuba. Paco is in a punk band, with songs that champion freedom, and doesn't hide his anger with the Communist regime of his homeland, especially now that there is an economic crisis. The shelves of the local shop are bare, and Paco teaches his younger brother how to catch, kill, and cook a stray cat, just in case he isn't around to help Gustavo.

The two brothers and their friends play and/or listen to rock music, which has been banned by the government, and after it becomes clear that Paco is more trouble than he's worth, the siblings' extended family announce they'll be leaving him behind on their planned trip by way of a raft to the United States. That's when Paco decides to inject himself with HIV-infected blood in order to go to one of those sanatoriums. Gustavo joins him, after bailing from the sinking raft and convincing a doctor to accept someone else's infected blood as his own.

The facility, run like camp or commune of sorts, looks like paradise to Gustavo, who gets to eat as much ice cream as he wants upon his arrival, gets a room entirely to himself, and can listen to his brother's band play whenever the day's work is finished and without any fear of being beaten or arrested by the police. That's how the story goes for a while, as the patients enjoy this idyllic life, Paco gets to live out his dream, and Gustavo flirts with Maria, whose only concern about reciprocating his advances, apparently, is that she believes he has HIV.

Eventually, things turn, obviously, with the sanatorium patients facing prejudice at a local bar, where they go to watch a sports match, and one man's condition worsening each day. Nilson and Schwartz become so caught up in the rebellious spirit and heedless attitude of its central characters that the filmmakers themselves come across as, at best, naïve or, at worst, thoughtless, here. Do they think this shift will come as a surprise to anyone, or is their thinking so broad on a thematic level that they haven't considered just how far ahead of this story we will be?

It may come as a shock to Paco and Gustavo what will happen to the older brother, his friends, and everyone else—apart from Gustavo and Maria—at the sanatorium, but to go along with their innocence or ignorance in the face of this disease feels disingenuous or even dismissive about the effects of AIDS. The movie is so stuck in the good feelings of the present that it doesn't acknowledge the inevitable future, until it actually happens. The story at the center of Los Frikis seems to be more about the cost of recklessly chasing some hazy notion of freedom, but here, that lesson is flipped in an odd, dishonest way.

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