Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Frida’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Wonderfully Immersive Documentary Dive Into Frida Kahlo’s Diaries

The number of films made about Frida Kahlo speaks volumes about her status as a cultural icon. Carla Gutierrez’s Frida (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is the latest of many documentaries about the Mexican painter, and the highest-profile Frida feature since Salma Hayek nabbed an Oscar nom for playing her in the 2002 biopic, also simply titled Frida. So let’s not get the two films confused as we dig into the new Frida, which really needed to set itself apart from the rest, and therefore consists wholly of archival footage and animated interpretations of her paintings and sketches, with interview material and excerpts from Frida’s diaries read by in-character voiceover actors. The result is a glimpse into her life that’s by no means comprehensive, but offers a revelatory intimacy that many will surely find stimulating.

FRIDA (2024): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “I paint because I need to.” These are the first words we hear from Frida (voiced by Fernanda Echevarria), and the rest of the film rallies around that earnest thesis statement. It’s 1910, and young Frida already was an outsider, trying not to laugh when everyone else around her prayed, and asking the local priest pragmatic questions about whether the virgin Mary was actually a virgin. She went to preparatory school to become a doctor, where she was one of very few girls in attendance – and where she dressed in a tie and pants and slicked her hair back to look more masculine, and either scraped by with crummy grades or cheated to get good ones. She met a boy named Alejandro and fell in love; he was a traditional romantic, but she – and these are her own words – wanted him to f— her, and this is our introduction to her voracious sexual appetite.

Frida was with Alejandro in 1925 when her life changed suddenly and radically. They were riding on a bus when it collided with a trolley. Frida was impaled by an iron railing. They couldn’t hear the ambulance over her screams. The doctors didn’t expect her to survive. She was trapped in a body cast in a hospital for an ungodly length of time that surely felt longer for a woman who relished personal freedom like she did – and one could argue that she never took such freedom for granted again. To cope with the agonizing confinement and immobility, her mother set up an easel so Frida could draw and paint in bed, and so she made portraits of her friends from school, and of herself. 

Frida would live with the pain of the incident for literally every day of the rest of her life – and that pain would be the primary theme of her art. She brought four of her paintings to famed Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1927, and he not only praised them, but also fell in love with her. And she with him, and if you’re wondering about the sincerity of his praise, Frida reveals that he soon was asking her opinion of his work, and taking her advice. She set aside her menswear and began wearing dresses for Diego, which speaks on her desire to neatly fit into his life, symbolizing how she existed in his shadow for many subsequent years, as they married and worked through the uberdrama of an open relationship that nevertheless spawned jealousy and turmoil. She traveled with him to New York and Detroit, where she learned to loathe the rich Americans ponying up for Diego’s commissions: “Stuck-up gringos,” she spits. “Motherf—ers. Sons of bitches.”

While in Detroit, Frida learned she was pregnant, and feared that her broken body wouldn’t allow her to carry to term. A doctor talked her out of aborting the fetus, and she suffered a brutal miscarriage that left her an emotional wreck, and prompted her to dive headlong into her art. All this time, she kept painting, painting, painting, admitting that she adopted Diego’s style. But it wasn’t until her marriage to Diego dissolved – what finally ended it? Her affair with Leon Trotsky, his affair with her dearest sister, Cristina – that she was compelled to follow her own muse, partly out of a desire to establish independence, partly because she needed to sell paintings to pay the bills. She eventually established her own identity as a world-renowned artist – she was lumped in with the surrealist movement, although she wasn’t aware it existed until Andre Breton curated exhibitions of her work in the late 1930s – and as an art teacher at a school in Mexico. She also did her damnedest to live with the increasingly debilitating physical pain that would torment her until her dying day.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I risk courting snobby-art-world critics by saying this, but the last time I saw a documentary about a painter with an instantly recognizable image who was horny as hell and became an icon after dying relatively young? Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed. 

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: On paper, hiring a voice actor to read Frida’s diary seems a step cheesier than the cheapo reenactments we often see in documentaries. But Echavarria sells it, giving Frida a voice and persona that’s a necessary component of the film.  

Memorable Dialogue: Frida’s incredibly horny recipe for happiness: “Make love, take a bath, and make love again.”

Sex and Skin: Nudity in Frida’s paintings; various verbal references.

Our Take: To know Frida with the intimacy this documentary offers is to absolutely fall in stupid, irrational, head-over-heels love with her. Here in the 21st century, Frida’s striking visage has become a meme and a T-shirt and a symbol of various social causes, and it’s therefore a wonderful experience to go a little deeper, to step inside her mind a bit and experience some scorching Frida Heat: Her lust, her physical pain, her passion to paint, paint, paint. And she apologized for none of it. The film presents her as unequivocally herself, a profanity-spewing, profoundly suffering woman who painted self-portrait after self-portrait, because that’s what she knew the best, and because, from our perspective at least, there was nothing in this world as distinctively beautiful, or mysterious, or poignantly soulful as her face. 

This Frida is by no means a thorough biography about how the woman’s joys and tragedies informed each other so profoundly, surely because that’s been done before; a fresh, unusual approach to documentary filmmaking seems like a mandate for material that’s been explored many times before. Gutierrez will raise eyebrows (and unibrows) for committing blasphemy and turning Frida’s paintings into animated graphics, but why spend precious movie run time staring at works we can easily look up after the credits roll? Her goal is to immerse us in Frida’s life and imagery, and seeing animated roots sprout from her self-portraits, and monkeys squirming in her arms as she stares unblinkingly into the camera, is a strange and wonderful experience, a beckoning to look closer, to consider the artist’s motives, and, most importantly, to feel what she was feeling. 

The voiceover-actor gambit pays off as well, injecting some melodrama – again, some welcome sweaty heat – into the by-nature dry documentary format. Gutierrez invites further criticism by essentially “colorizing” black-and-white footage of life in Mexico in the 1910s and ’20s, filling in images with yellows and reds, as if Frida was coloring the world around her. This is the filmmaker making significant creative choices – and making the first-person bio come alive vividly and memorably. Few documentary filmmakers show the courage to so egregiously toy with form and style; this is Gutierrez channeling the spirit of her subject, lusciously, unapologetically.

Our Call: Frida is wonderful. It may inspire newcomers to dive deep into Frida’s life and work; it may offer the familiar a delightful new perspective on the woman. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.