A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash, then leaves the ceremony to wander the streets. Clad in a vivid blue coat, she stands out from the grey cobblestone streets she traverses. A quiet storefront captures her attention. Its window, amber-lit against the murky day, shows a piece of cloth stitched with an image of people sewing. She continues on her way, and while crossing a bridge over a churning river, she hoists herself over the railing and plunges into the water. The police rescue her and deliver her back to her hotel wrapped in a shimmering, gold thermal blanket. She tries to take a shower, but the water running down the drain triggers something in her, and she turns off the tap. She has not spoken one word.
This is the stunner of an opening for Argentinian director Milagros Mumenthaler’s new film, The Currents, and the film follows the aftermath of this woman’s plunge. Catalina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola), a fashion designer and artist, develops a suffocating phobia of water, preventing her from focusing on her work or being present with her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), and her young daughter, Sofía (Emma Fayo Duarte). Writer-director Mumenthaler maintains a degree of opacity in how she depicts Catalina; the story is never entirely linear and Catalina’s sudden jump and lingering aversion to water are never entirely explicable. What she does capture—sometimes powerfully, sometimes a touch too obliquely—is Catalina’s distance from the external world and from her own interior life. How does a person move on with their life, Mumenthaler prompts us to question, when they suddenly feel that they are being swept along by forces stronger than their own will?
Mumenthaler follows Catalina through the routines of her home and work life as she struggles to maintain equilibrium. While, at first, her family and colleagues do not seem to notice a difference in her, González-Sola effectively portrays how her character works diligently, to diminishing returns, to bury her all-consuming fear of water under an anodyne exterior. What truly poses a stumbling block in her daily life is her long, thick hair, which she has not washed in days and is causing her skin irritation and self-consciousness. It seems like an oddly surface-level emphasis, but it rings true that the most immediately deleterious effect of Catalina’s anxiety is an energy-consuming struggle to go through the basic motions of caring for herself.
While psychologically insightful, it becomes cinematically uninteresting to watch Catalina navigating her mental block. González-Sola’s performance is recessive to the point that her screen presence sometimes comes across as flat; though she portrays her character’s masking of her fear convincingly, she is still muted even in unguarded moments, placing the viewer at a distance that is just slightly too far. This distancing performance aligns with Mumenthaler’s narrative strategy; she never gives full insight into what may have spurred Catalina’s leap into the water, and is almost as withholding about what self-reflection, if any, it spurs in Catalina. While seeming to reach for an intriguing ambiguity, Mumenthaler ultimately overshoots and lands in vagueness, leaving the viewer with an understanding of Catalina that is almost as limited as in the film’s enigmatic opening.
Though Mumenthaler’s narrative strategy is flawed, her visual strategies are often striking. With director of photography Gabriel Sandru, she crafts a number of shots that clearly reference Hitchcock’s Vertigo (as does the plot itself). Sandru accordingly captures color in a way that is as vivid and enrapturing as Robert Burks’ photography for Hitchcock’s film, with electric blues, verdant forest greens, and deep crimsons providing both visual and subtextual texture to otherwise cryptic scenes.
The silent opening Mumenthaler crafts is one of the film’s two strongest sequences, aesthetically and narratively; the other equally striking scene is an unusual slip into surrealism that occurs in a lighthouse that is, oddly, at the top of Catalina’s apartment building. Catalina has followed Sofía up there, who claims she can see Catalina’s employee, Julia (Ernestina Gatti), walking on the street, despite how far from the ground the lighthouse is. Catalina then starts to drift into a state of semi-consciousness, where she sees the searchlight casts its light on Julia and a series of other people she knows, providing a golden-lit glimpse of what each of them are presently doing. There is not a simple or clear explanation for why this scene occurs, or what it even reveals about Catalina’s state of mind. Yet it is beautifully executed by Mumenthaler and Sandru, and the inexplicable peeks into the routines of minor characters provides a fascinating counterpoint to Catalina’s difficulty navigating her own life. Catalina may not understand what these visions of others’ daily lives mean, but they make an indelible subconscious impact. At its best, Mumenthaler’s flawed but fascinating film delivers the same effect.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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