by Brian Susbielles

It’s the early 1990s and Cuba, once given a lot of aid by the communist alliance in the Soviet Union, is now under economic stagnation due to the Soviet collapse. The “Special Period,” as it was called, was an era of hardship with little food, no money, and a lack of work. For the youth, a subculture called Los Frikis (a play-on word of “freaky”) has grown out of the discontent with the government has banned rock music as being “the music of the enemy,” aka the U.S. Faced with police brutality and imprisonment for defying the law, and with the AIDS pandemic hitting the country, two brothers decide to do a desperate ploy to get out of their situation.

Enter brothers Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) and Paco (Héctor Medina), who are part of this subculture and want to leave this poverty life they’re trapped in. Paco, the eldest and leading “frikis,” intentionally infects himself with HIV so he can go to an isolated location where other HIV-positive people are. Gustavo, deciding not to go through a perilous journey by raft to the U.S., also joins his brother, but fakes his HIV-positive status rather than doing the deed. At a sanitarium, the brothers get the luxuries of a bed, food, and even music, things millions of Cubans struggle to have daily. 

Away from the troubles in Havana, a new utopia is created with the freedoms that no one has ever felt before. They have done this to defy the law, even though neither of them is aware of how serious HIV is. This is more like a summer camp than a serious facility for sick people. Still, it couldn’t have been much worse than those doing hard labor and their fellow attendees who have Maria (Hit Man’s Adria Arjona), a young woman who lost her brother to AIDS, running the center and making it quite comfortable. Of course, the real truth about HIV comes to them with no cure, and reality sets in with their diagnosis of being terminal. 

Writing-directing duo Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz follow up their touching The Peanut Butter Falcon with another story about going against the rules for one’s freedom. The strength comes in the actors, all born in Cuba except Arjona, and gave Nilson and Schwartz some dialogue that would be more natural and authentic to them. You see the comparison of the horrible urban decay and the beauty of the Caribbean sun which shows the seriousness of their actions, especially the guilt-ridden Gustavo because he is not sick and sees his friends wither away to their deaths.

With those humorous moments mixed in with the tragic ones, Nilson and Schwartz do a solid job of bringing to life caught within a real-life hell that had hope for a time. Los Frikis is about outsiders seeking a type of refuge from a brutal world and young people learning stuff they would have never known in Castro’s totalitarianism. It’s a coming-of-age story that shows the unbreakable spirit of these characters in a paradise the camera captures which seemed impossible. Moving to the classic rock sounds of Nirvana and The Rolling Stones, that taboo music, Los Frikis is a breath of fresh that gives a new lease on life to a period in a country shrouded in darkness.

4 stars

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