The Argentine director Milagros Mumenthaler believes in ghosts but not villains. The Currents (2025), her third feature, presents a woman named Catalina who is haunted, completely and in the most mundane way. In a performance that astonishes even on the fifth viewing, Isabel Aimé González-Sola presents a person living in two or three places at once, distracted from her successful life as a fashion designer by an unnamed demon. While in Geneva to accept a prize, Catalina jumps without warning into a river. In anybody’s hands, this would probably draw in the viewers, but Mumenthaler is operating on an entirely different level. Using closeups of shoes and big blocky colors—coats and dresses are like the Greek chorus of The Currents—Mumenthaler skips traditional plot points to track Catalina’s struggle to release herself from a curse she doesn’t understand. She is no sooner in the river than she’s back at the hotel, wrapped in a gold foil emergency blanket, like she’s taken in a movie or a few galleries.
Back in Buenos Aires, Catalina can’t deal with water, and her unwashed hair becomes an oceanic threat. Played with microscopic tenderness by Esteban Bigliardi, Catalina’s husband Pedro is not our secret antagonist, nor is her assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti). The phobia around water is something else, a haunting that has her hallucinating video game sounds and bathing herself with wet wipes. Buenos Aires becomes a storm of planes and sheets, and as Catalina winds through her family and strained friendships, she keeps skirting some kind of physical collapse. The tension levels she experiences here put Jason Statham to shame.
In her previous films, Back to Stay (2011) and The Idea of a Lake (2016), young women coming to grips with absence is also the theme, though more is spelled out. In Back to Stay, three sisters are set loose in a big house after their grandmother suddenly dies, and The Idea of a Lake tracks the emotional math needed to navigate the debts incurred by the state when someone is disappeared. (The Argentine figure of the desaparecido is no longer so alien to Americans.) In The Currents, the absence is not named as distinctly, but the pressure is unbearably real. Mumenthaler creates a somatic unease that equals Hitchcock for a sort of permanent paranoia, using edits and closeups to mimic a mind that cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up entirely. In a sequence set to “Venus, the Bringer of Peace,” from Holst’s The Planets, Catalina and her daughter Sofia sit in the nest of a lighthouse tower. The light works by itself, casting its beam across a cast of supporting characters who are living complete and satisfying lives, coming to rest on a location we haven’t seen. This sets up the quiet and vivid conclusion, when defenses finally yield and three generations of daughters navigate what it means to let the water in.
The Currents screens Sunday afternoon, October 4, at Shapeshifters Cinema as part of the Vital Signs screening series.
