112 min | R | May 27, 2020 | Netflix
Ulises and his crew slow cumbia records to a crawl and dance to the wreckage in baggy clothes and towering sculpted hair. Then cartel violence runs him out of Monterrey and dumps him in Queens, where nobody has ever heard the music that made him who he is. Fernando Frías de la Parra builds a quiet elegy for a subculture nobody was watching disappear.
Ulises Sampiero leads a small crew of teenagers in the hillside slums of Monterrey. They call themselves Los Terkos. They build their entire identity around kolombia, a subculture that slows cumbia records to a crawl and dances to the syrupy result in baggy clothes and elaborate sculpted hair. A burst of cartel violence forces Ulises to flee to Queens, where nobody recognizes the world he comes from. The film is about what a person loses when the only thing he ever belonged to gets stripped away.
Juan Daniel García Treviño plays Ulises with a guarded stillness that does most of the work. He keeps his face nearly blank and lets his eyes carry the loss. In Monterrey he moves with quiet authority over his crew. In Queens he shrinks into doorways and basements, a boy who no longer knows where to put his body. Xueming Angelina Chen plays Lin, the Chinese American teenager who takes an interest in him, and she gives the New York scenes their only warmth. The crew back home, played by Bianca Coral Puente Valenzuela and Tania Alvarado among others, register as real kids rather than set dressing.
Fernando Frías de la Parra writes and directs, and he refuses to tell the story in order. He cuts between the collapse in Monterrey and the exile in Queens so that cause and consequence arrive out of sequence. The structure makes the audience feel the disorientation before it understands the events. The slowed cumbia, the rebajada, does the same work on the soundtrack. It warps pitch and tempo until celebration and mourning sound identical. The camera holds on the Monterrey hillsides long enough to make the place a character, which sharpens the flatness of the Queens exteriors.
The film is strongest when it stays inside the subculture and trusts the dancing to explain everything. It loses tension in the Queens stretches, where the story slows and circles without advancing. The ending lands because Frías earns it through patience rather than incident. This is a portrait of a specific subculture at the moment it gets erased, and it treats that erasure as a real loss. The film does not romanticize Los Terkos and it does not condescend to them. It just watches them disappear.