The Currents (2026) Review: Milagros Mumenthaler Crafts A Taut and Simmering Psychological Stew

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Milagros Mumenthaler’s “The Currents” (2026, Original title: Las corrientes) is an elaborate, cheeky puzzle of a film. Like all great psychological dramas, it keeps you utterly riveted and doesn’t stop buzzing in your head long after the lights come up. It’s brooding, enigmatic, and effortlessly stylish. There’s a verve and vitality to the storytelling that arcs between subtle, fleeting gestures.

Beneath a moment, shivers of possibility spike the unsaid with reserves of volcanic emotion. If only things could be uttered and the situation confronted, the heroine, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), might find herself on safer shores. Instead, she allows herself to be tumbled every now and then in what she hesitates to reckon with. The hope to free herself runs up against a wall of responsibility and social projection. To make herself anew, she has to let go.

A Buenos Aires designer, she is in Geneva on a work trip. Suddenly, she leaps off a bridge into a river. Once she’s pulled out, everything seems to have shifted. All that she has been repressing feels amplified to a momentous degree. Every beat seems to hit a raw nerve. She hides it but fumbles. She’s on edge, perilous, and barely clutching onto her sanity. This nerve-jangling disquiet creeps through every fibre of this delicate drama riven with unrest. Once she’s returned home to her husband and daughter, the frays appear more intensely.

She struggles to paper over the fractures and develops hydrophobia. A lingering shot of her enveloping hair oozes intrigue. There’s a stillness to the film that belies its huge inner churn. Lina’s routine is shaken. As much as she strains to pull herself together, a key part of her is torn asunder. Is a return even possible, or is the hope delusional?

The film gradually hints at the illusion of a wonderful life that Lina had fallen apart. Mumenthaler constructs an elegant inner world, veering between opacity and soft revelation. There are no big surprises. Notice how Lina guards herself tightly amongst the people she’s closest to. There’s a discomfort that she might deny but registers sharply.

It becomes increasingly unavoidable, pressing continually at her. But there’s the matter of her daughter. Can she really afford to shirk her domestic, maternal identity in pursuit of her unalloyed happiness? Peace remains elusive. She’s in quicksand. The more she tries to turn herself away from the truth, the more it threatens to swallow her.

There’s a certain thrill to be found in films that allow you to wonder, wander through their intricate maze. They aren’t interested in explaining themselves away in petty gestures. While “The Currents” does especially lean towards a psychological connection in its latter stretches, it’s at its most arresting when it just floats around. When it’s as untethered as excitingly unpredictable, the film assumes a vortex of emotional instability that feels impossible to pin down. Its resistance to a neat outline becomes its most compelling tool.

Mumenthaler is extraordinarily gifted in wielding the aural weapons of the medium to infer and draw forth an unsettled psychosis. Every trickling aural suggestion is a clue by which you can examine and probe the choppy waters of the drama. There’s an almost-tectonic restlessness with which the film unfurls. “The Currents” is as beguiling as deceptive. It shifts and sweeps over you with a force that’s inevitable and irrepressible.

The appearance of being clinically sedate is set up in thrilling contrast with an inherent volatility. The heroine isn’t one to share what she’s feeling. The only person she talks to about the incident is her friend. But there’s no headway. The drifting apart from her family has been hovering in the air for a while. Socially, Lina is a success. She has built a nice, comfortable life. She has a great job and is married with a kid. But the cracks are showing. Is this the life she truly desired? Just because she has a fancy career, a seemingly functional marriage, and a loving daughter? The questions storm forth, demanding and insistent.

Mumenthaler builds a rich interpretive space where you can gather and arrive at your conclusions. She never lets you judge her character. But you do feel compelled to urge Lina to move out of the dilemma. She must take herself out of this stalemate. How long can she fester in it? Mumenthaler orchestrates with a gracefully measured hand. It is so expertly chiselled, so precisely modulated, which still wafts through exquisite vagueness. There’s a freedom in its storytelling that chafes against strictures of any sort.

You sense Lina’s quailing need for liberation, which she can barely assert. She feels too hemmed in to her family to fully move out into the space which she so pines for. “The Currents” possesses mysteries that are beautifully open, inviting, and yet fiercely private. It’s this seductive tussle that makes it wholly beguiling. It’s absolutely bewitching and impossible to look away.