The Currents (“Las corrientes”) ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Availability: See end of review.
Writ on Water
“Nowhere to Go.” It could be an alternative title for Argentine writer and director Milagros Mumenthaler’s bleak film. The phrase captures how “The Currents” confines and limits its mentally ill protagonist, Lina (a compelling Isabel Aimé González-Sola)—and the theater audience along with her—presenting the young career woman as unhappy, non-verbal, and lacking in free will, tossed about by her feelings (of ephemeralness, of inadequacy) and senses (the sounds of a sewing machine, of workers in the street, of a man playing the timpani, and always water, and the feeling of her hair).
In a shocking opening scene, Lina receives an award for design at a conference in Geneva, only moments later to dump the glass trophy into the bathroom trash like a used hand towel.
On the surface, Lina has a reasonable life. She’s a creative force in a boutique fashion design company (no terrible boss, no nasty co-workers); has an accomplished, “super” husband (as a friend describes him) who cares about her and whom she enjoys sexually; and is the mother of a healthy and vivacious 6-year-old daughter, Sofía (Emma Fayo Duarte). Although not gorgeous, Lina is engagingly attractive, “my dazzle-in-law,” as her husband’s mother refers to her. None of it—oh, maybe the daughter—seems to matter. In a shocking opening scene, Lina receives an award for design at a conference in Geneva, only moments later to dump the glass trophy into the bathroom trash like a used hand towel (and then things go from bad to worse). The penultimate scene reprises the first, with husband Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) about to receive an award at a gala ceremony, sending Lina, overcome by social discomfort and some weird sounds only she hears, fleeing into the night.
Isabel Aimé González-Sola is compelling as Lina, the young career wife and mother who is "trying not to be ephemeral." Even her red lips confound her as she paints on her lipstick and just as quickly wipes it off.
If there is a pleasure to this depressing film, it’s in trying to figure out what’s happening to Lina and why, in assembling the film’s loose ends into something comprehensible. Mumenthaler attempts to have the viewer feel what someone in that situation might feel: trapped in her own bubble, confined in her own head, no explanation satisfactory. Lina may have a problem with body image and physical identity; she seems uncomfortable with lipstick (and perhaps with her lips), has a painful rash on the back of her neck, and can’t stand to wash or brush her enormous shock of black hair. She’s literally uncomfortable in her own skin. Maybe she feels guilty for not being the perfect mother or wife, serving meals from “those damn boxes” (Pedro’s words) rather than cooking from scratch, then losing track of Sofía (who disappears into a tower—homage to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” [1958]) while she obsessively rebuilds a wooden spinner contraption that appears to have no purpose.
Lina is literally uncomfortable in her own skin.
Water is a key to whatever ails Lina. She can’t bear to pull Sofía out of the bathwater, or to wash her own hands or hair, and sink drains are the stuff of near horror. The “currents” of the title beg for analysis. A 1-minute scene with a psychotherapist—Lina touching on her feelings about water (“a current that will wash me away,” water “transports” her out of the physical world)—is not enough to clarify what remains, well, murky. “I’m trying not to feel ephemeral,” she explains.
Lina (González-Sola) literally runs away--from social engagements, and from herself.
At the heart of the “nowhere-to-go” problem is Mumenthaler’s script, which presents Lina as taciturn: unable, or unwilling, except for that moment with her therapist, to talk about what’s in her head. Not to her husband (unlike Gina Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ “Woman Under the Influence” [1974] or Rose Byrne in last year’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), not to her friend, hair-washer, and amateur therapist Amalia.
Up against the “nowhere to go” problem that haunts all efforts at tackling mental illness in film, the director offers the scene that “explains everything,” or seems to.
It’s all very frustrating, and not only for viewers. Up against the “nowhere to go” problem that haunts all efforts at tackling mental illness in film, the director offers the scene that “explains everything,” or seems to, a throwback to the didactic moments that were a Hollywood staple in the postwar Freudian era. After years of estrangement, Lina visits her mother in her childhood home. We’ll learn that Lina’s mother has her own head of big hair. That she didn’t (and doesn’t) cook, either. Judging from the carefully stacked canned goods in the kitchen cupboard, she is anal compulsive. A fish tank in Lina’s unchanged childhood bedroom is a metaphor for Lina’s sense of being trapped. Lina cuddles on her bed with the favorite stuffed animal she left behind. The house is dark, locked up tight as a drum. Mom is a recluse, maybe even the “bad mother,” the mid-century favorite cause of screwed-up children. Lina has reason to fear that she is as well.
Now we have an explanation. But it’s overdetermined and incomplete (where’s the water?). Worse than nothing. A spoiler that doesn’t spoil enough, doesn’t do the job. As Pedro and her mother understand, Lina’s primary physical attribute is her “gaze,” a searing look that conveys that there’s a lot—too much, really—going on inside. “Where have you gone?” he asks. What’s missing is Lina’s voice. And without that, we’re left with “nowhere to go.”
He says: In a critical, repeated scene, Lina describes herself as “falling,” not “jumping.” So many loose ends, so little time!
She says: Two-thirds of a good movie, and an intriguing performance.
Date: 2025 (released in US 2026)
Director: Milagros Mumenthaler
Starring: Isabel Aimé González-Sola, Esteban Bigliardi, Emma Fayo Duarte
Countries: Argentina, Switzerland
Language: Spanish
Runtime: 104 minutes
Other Awards: 1 win and 15 nominations, premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
Availability: Online for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango Streaming. See JustWatch here for complete availability. No longer in theaters. The initial limited US theatrical release ran June to early July. It rolled out in other international markets in early 2026.
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