‘The Currents’ TIFF Review: Haunted by Water, Adrift in Herself

Catalina—known as Lina, or sometimes Cata, depending on who asks—travels to Switzerland to receive an award. An Argentine designer and artist, she feels like a fish out of water in the corporate office where strangers applaud her. She doesn’t quite grasp what she’s doing there. In a dreamlike gesture—the first of many—she slips out of the reception hall, ducks into the bathroom, tosses the award into the trash, and disappears into the streets of the immaculate city. Her wandering isn’t so much a stroll as a drift: into an antiques shop, through narrow alleys, until she finds herself on a bridge over the river. On a sudden, unexplainable impulse, she throws herself into the water. Rescued by police and brought back to her hotel, Lina begins to settle her nerves, though even the simple act of stepping into the shower seems impossible.

When she returns to Buenos Aires, Lina is no longer quite the same. That inner shift—illegible even to herself—is what drives The Currents (Las corrientes), the third feature by Milagros Mumenthaler (Abrir puertas y ventanas, La idea de un lago). The film is a mysterious, unsettling meditation on what happens when a woman strays from the path she thought she was on, when the securities that have carried her vanish, leaving her in an uncertain, ungraspable state.

Back in her elegant Buenos Aires home, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) goes through the motions of everyday life, but it’s as if she’s impersonating herself. Her partner, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), is too absorbed in his corporate world to notice at first, though eventually even he picks up on the change. His mother (Claudia Sánchez), who helps care for Lina’s daughter Sofía (Emma Fayo Duarte), senses it too. Lina fumbles her maternal duties, forgetting school pick-ups, slipping away at dawn to a hair salon where an old acquaintance (Jazmín Carballo) subjects her to risky treatments. Increasingly consumed by her own inner world, she begins to neglect daily responsibilities. New phobias creep in—foremost among them an inability to submerge herself in water.

With cool precision that recalls Michelangelo Antonioni—the great chronicler of spiritual and psychological emptiness among the bourgeoisie—Mumenthaler penetrates the psyche of her protagonist. González Sola delivers a magnetic performance, pulling the film into Lina’s drift. The narrative itself begins to wander, veering off into detours that may or may not exist only in her mind: nightmare visions, strange fantasies, uncanny slices of life in the city.

Lina becomes a figure of constant unease, a woman who might at any moment fling herself from a balcony (her office in the iconic Palacio Barolo makes the possibility all the more present), vanish mid-event, or act unpredictably without intending harm. At times, she reconnects—bonding with her daughter, collaborating with her fashionable assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti), re-engaging with her husband. At others, she seems suspended in a kind of perpetual limbo.

Mumenthaler anchors the free-floating narrative in moments of clarity. In a candid conversation at the salon, Lina explains what happened in Switzerland, hinting at her self-awareness and dispelling the notion of a supernatural “possession.” Later, a more explicit psychological explanation is offered—a scene that may be the film’s one misstep, closing down some of its ambiguity.

The film’s elegance and restraint align it with a certain strand of contemporary European cinema rather than what is usually associated with Latin American filmmaking. Its silences, its framing, even its enigmatic rhythms recall directors like Christian Petzold or Angela Schanelec. That the film is a Swiss co-production is no accident. Shot by Romanian cinematographer Gabriel Sandru (Azor), Las corrientes casts Buenos Aires as both luminous and inscrutable, a city as elusive as its protagonist.

Immaculate settings, unruffled performances that hover between naturalism and slight affectation, and a social milieu of high fashion, business cocktails, and quiet luxury ground the film in an upper-middle-class (if not outright upper-class) world. But Lina herself contains other elements, other streets, other lives. Her disorientation may stem from this tension: the pressure to always be, or at least appear to be, what others demand. To inhabit a role that is never entirely hers. Currents emerges as both a portrait of a woman at a breaking point and a probing exploration of the mysteries of the human mind. Haunting and enigmatic, it lingers not in what it explains but in the spaces it leaves open.