The Currents Review: Drowning in Life

What causes award-winning designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) to calmly drop into the freezing waters of the Rhône with the clear intention of killing herself? In The Currents (Las corrientes), the new psychological study by Milagros Mumenthaler, even Lina can’t really say. After all, she has everything: a loving husband (Esteban Bigliardi) who is passionate about her, an adoring daughter (Emma Fayo Duarte), a successful international business. Yet just as the currents of the river seemed set to make her a brief headline in Geneva’s newspapers, she is back on dry land. Why? Again, that’s something even she can’t really explain.

On her return to Argentina, she pretends that nothing has happened, as if she can leave the memories behind in the same way that she dumped her latest prize in the trash. But, as the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are, and now she’s home with not only all her old baggage, but a little something extra: extreme hydrophobia, a fear of water so extreme that she can’t even take a shower, or help her daughter out of the tub.

The Currents is at its most incisive when it’s not trying to diagnose Lina, which is why a third act revelation seems almost trite. It’s most fascinating during Lina’s earlier attempts to alternatively hide, ignore, suppress, or indulge her inner maelstrom, all while concealing it under a placid surface. Intriguingly, she barely acknowledges herself, instead transferring both her dreams of a normal life and her suicidal ideation onto the women surrounding her, or even onto passing strangers. Her yearning is to not be herself. As such, it’s almost a cruel joke that Mumenthaler (directing her own script) often leaves her on her own, caught with her least favorite person for company.

At the same time, that means the audience is allowed to center all their attention on an extraordinary, near-wordless performance from González-Sola. She makes sense of Lina’s chaos through finding the simple emotional truth in each moment and translating it into subtle physicality. It’s almost interpretive dance, executed with such astounding delicacy and control that it’s possible to read her expression from behind. It’s in the droop of a shoulder, the way a shoe is removed, how she clings to husband Pedro physically while exiling him emotionally.

These details are complimented by the cinematography of Gabriel Sandru, who is equally as adept at his signature serene long shots of cityscapes as he is at subtly invoking a sense of a character’s perspective. There’s a moment when Pedro walks in on Lina in her workshop, her curves and flawless skin and long hair falling, that could be a film school exemplar of the male gaze. Yet it’s executed in a way that never diminishes him or her – instead, it’s the distillation of a wave of adoration and lust breaking against the rocks of her disinterest in life.

If anything, the collaboration between González-Sola, Mumenthaler, and Sandru is a case study of how the elements of cinema fuse together to become what Roger Ebert so aptly dubbed an empathy machine. There’s an aside of a scene in which Lina visits Buenos Aires’ Museo Nacional de Belle Artes and stands before “Explosión de una locomotora” (“Exploding Locomotive”) by 19th century Romantic artist Jenaro Pérez Villaamil. That this picture is the one that fascinates her, the way her eye is drawn to bold sweeps of red (one of many repeated visual motifs throughout the film), the evocation of Lina’s presence even when she is not onscreen: Combined, it’s like reading James Joyce, a cinematic stream of consciousness in which the film and the audience finds Lina, even if she is lost to herself.

The Currents

2025, R, 102 min. Directed by Milagros Mumenthaler. Starring Isabel Aimé González-Sola, Esteban Bigliardi, Emma Fayo Duarte, Sara Bessio, Jazmín Carballo.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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