Fine Young Men (2024) – Mexican gay teen drama
Fine Young Men (2024): Boys, Guilt and a System Built to Protect Them
Fine Young Men / Hombres íntegros (2024) looks like yet another “boys will be boys” school drama – and then calmly walks you into a nightmare built out of privilege, cowardice and silence. We follow Alf, a rich kid in a Catholic boys’ school in Mexico City, who comes back after a year in the US and suddenly doesn’t fit into his old pack of loud, homophobic athletes anymore. He is drawn instead to Oliver – the “weird” kid with a guitar, a French hippie mom, a cousin who plays drums, and a completely different idea of what being a man even means.
A new world with Oliver and Diana
The film takes its time with this new connection. Alf and Oliver rehearse old folk songs, hang out in a house full of incense, spiritual posters and gentle chaos. Diana, Oliver’s cousin, floats around them – funny, loud, alive, the kind of girl who has seen every red flag and still wants to dance. For a while it feels like Alf might actually break away from his group, from the macho jokes and the casual slurs, and choose something softer, more honest. Of course, that would be too easy.
Proving you are “one of the guys”
Back at school, his friends immediately smell blood. They tease, poke and push: if Alf likes hanging out with “the marihuanito” and the artsy queer kid, then maybe Alf is not that straight, not that “one of us” anymore. Director Alejandro Andrade uses these scenes with cruel precision – the locker room talk, the drunk chanting, the way boys measure each other’s masculinity by how aggressively they humiliate everyone else. Alf is terrified of falling on the wrong side of that line, and that fear becomes the real villain of the movie.
One night, one crime, no way back
Everything explodes one night during a party that starts as “just another peda” and ends in a crime that the film never shows in graphic detail, but that you feel in your stomach anyway. Diana gets too drunk, the guys drag her away, there is shouting, panic, blood, and a decision that will mark all of them for life. From that point on, Fine Young Men turns into a moral horror film: what do you do after you cross a line you can never uncross, and your whole world is built to protect you instead of hold you accountable?
System built to protect “fine young men”
Andrade is very clear about the system here. Alf’s father is a polished, ambitious politician who talks about public security and justice on TV while quietly arranging the cover-up off-screen. The Church offers prayer instead of responsibility. The school prefers clean reputations over uncomfortable truth. The boys learn very quickly that in their social class, “being a man” means never paying the real price – you just pay money, call a cousin in the Fiscalía, and let someone else rewrite the story as a suicide.
Guilt, desire and pushing away the truth
In the middle of all this, Alf shuts down. Andrés Revo plays him with a constant tension in his body – wanting to confess, wanting to run, wanting to disappear. His half-buried attraction to Oliver hurts even more now, because Oliver represents the version of himself he betrayed. Their scenes together after the crime are some of the most painful in the film: one boy desperate to talk, the other pushed away “for his own good”, as if distance could protect him from the rot.
Public awards, private rot
One of the strongest choices in the film is the contrast between private guilt and public performance. Outside, we see protests in the street, women chanting and holding signs, refusing the official version of events. Inside, at the Catholic school, the semester closes with an award ceremony for “el hombre íntegro” – the most exemplary, spiritual and morally pure student. Watching that prize being handed out while we know what has been done behind the scenes is pure acid. Integrity here is not a virtue, it is branding.
Why Fine Young Men stays with you
Fine Young Men is not subtle about its themes, toxic masculinity, class privilege, homophobia, political corruption – but it also does not feel like a lecture. It feels like someone finally pointing at the obvious and saying out loud what everyone in these circles already knows: the system will always protect “fine young men” like Alf and his friends, unless somebody breaks the silence. The film does not give easy catharsis, and that is exactly why it lingers. It leaves you with a simple, ugly question: if you were Alf, what would you have done – and more importantly, what would you be doing now?
