To the Lighthouse
By Lawrence Garcia
New York Film Festival 2025:
The Currents
Dir. Milagros Mumenthaler, Switzerland/Argentina, no distributor
Argentinian writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature opens with a woman staring out of a high-rise window, her expression partially obscured by the reflection of the wintry landscape before her. After receiving an award from an applauding crowd, she heads to the toilet, where after washing her hands, she glances at her glass trophy and casually pushes it into a garbage bin as a kind of afterthought. Wandering the cobblestone paths of the city, she strolls by a shop whose window display catches her eye. Now carrying a small package, she walks to the center of a bridge. And then, in a long shot that obscures her expression but clarifies her unhesitating movements, she jumps into the water. When we next see her, she is walking into a hotel lobby wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket.
With this enigmatic, elliptical, entirely wordless prologue, Mumenthaler makes it immediately apparent that her film will center squarely on the mystery of her protagonist, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola). When she returns to her home in Buenos Aires, after what we learn was a trip to Switzerland, we are gradually woven into the fabric of her everyday existence—her professional obligations as a fashion designer, as well as her domestic life with her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), and young daughter, Sofia. But given what we have seen, the details of her routine take on far less importance than her attempts to reacclimate herself to it. Reeling from the vertigo of that destabilizing prologue, we search for clues that would explain her behavior, scanning every image for the source of her disaffection. Who is this woman? Why did she jump? And why has she chosen to return?
Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to these questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water. A significant part of her readjustment thus involves negotiating the practical consequences of this new situation—such as her inability to care for her daughter as she bathes, and the complications this introduces into her marital sex life. These details, and others like it, might incline one to see Lina’s hydrophobia as a kind of metaphor—a body-horror stand-in for her alienation from her upper-crust existence. Yet Mumenthaler concretizes Lina’s dilemma in ways that push against such a neat reading. Turning away from her social circles, Lina seeks help from an old acquaintance, Amalia, with whom she shares an evidently significant, though largely unspecified history. A hairdresser by profession, Amalia helps Lina by putting her under with gas, washing her hair, and then cleaning her nude body—an act that registers like nothing so much as the preparation of a corpse. This is also to say that if Lina’s phobia is a metaphor, it is one whose significance is much less straightforward than it may at first seem.
Played with mesmerizing opacity by González Sola, Lina takes her place alongside the inscrutable heroines of such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s The Passion According to Berenice (1976), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), and, closer to home, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008)—all alienated from their environments, all troubled for reasons that they are unable to fully explain. Like those directors, Mumenthaler does not simply withhold the reasons Lina might have for behaving the way she does. Many basic narrative details, such as what her husband does for a living, are indeed elided. Nonetheless, by the end of the film, we are able to identify several plausible sources from which to trace the roots of her discontent—not just her anxieties about motherhood but also the sublimated class tensions between her and her husband’s family. What The Currents resists, then, is not the idea that there might be some cause of her present predicament, but that identifying this cause would really resolve anything. What Mumenthaler resists, in other words, is the assumption that Lina’s behavior could be accounted for by locating a past traumatic event.
Mumenthaler’s refusal of such explanations manifests clearly when Lina narrates the events of her Swiss trip to Amalia, and we flash back to the day of the jump, filling in the ellipses of the prologue. Here, one might expect some dramatic passkey—a plot revelation such as one might find in a classic Hollywood noir or a Hitchcockian thriller à la Spellbound, with their explicitly psychoanalytic frameworks of character action and behavior. Yet instead of some traumatic event, we see an unsensational scene of Lina buying a hand-stitched textile from a Swiss shop. The pattern on the cloth she buys depicts three women weaving, recalling the Greek Fates, traditionally seen as the personifications of destiny—a detail which might prompt one to trace the thread of Lina’s life still further into her past. And by the end of the film, we will indeed have seen Lina visit her troubled mother, and perhaps understood something more of her unease regarding her daughter. But over the course of the film, we are also led to question the sort of vulgar Freudianism which would simply identify a childhood trauma as the source from which one’s present neuroses spring.
Much of this questioning derives from the way The Currents conveys Lina’s discontent not through concrete dramatic situations but through reveries and ever more surprising digressions from her perspective. Stepping away from the set of a photo shoot, Lina wanders into the corridors of the building and happens upon a man playing the timpani drums—an incongruous, unremarked-upon event that recalls a similar scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), where Tilda Swinton’s heroine is momentarily waylaid from her search to observe a jazz session in full. Later, as Lina waits in the hallway of a client’s home, contemplating a sculpture at its center, the scene suddenly segues—in what may be a daydream, a flashback, or some amalgam of the two—to the sight of Lina’s client wandering an art museum, offering up images of Monets and Goyas entirely detached from the central narrative. Near the film’s climax, having momentarily lost sight of her daughter, Lina finds her perched on the lighthouse of their apartment building—at which point, Holst’s “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” swelling on the soundtrack, the camera ranges into the streets of Buenos Aires, following the lives of three women known to Lina, but venturing far beyond her limited acquaintance with them. In this rapturous passage, it’s as if Lina were attempting to escape her own life by projecting herself into the imagined identities of others, searching the cosmos for a way to break free from her world.
The Currents eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition. In the film’s closing image of Lina laying down on her bed in a silk red nightgown, listening to the soft patter of rain outside, the filmmaker locates something beyond a simplistic equivalence of freedom and movement. After all, in a life lived after the flood, being swept away may be easier than staying in place.