ISABEL AIMÉ GONZALEZ SOLA IN THE CURRENTS
Elegant dysfunction
This celebrated Argentine film can be called a psychological thriller. Its power lies first in its total focus on its protagonist, a woman whose trauma we get to see later, and it involves water, and it has made her afraid of water. That's right: just washing her hands and her face or her hair, God forbid, frightens her. The power of the film is that it never forgets who she is and who we are watching and what she's going through. The devil is in the details, the laser focus. But also the beauty, and this is an elegant film that honors its traumatized protagonist seriously, with respect.
Rather than alienating Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola), also known by other names, as Cata and Catalina, tellingly, because her condition and her identity are fluid (pun intended). The film makes the world in sympathy with her so it is treated in a surreal or magic realist manner. Her condition is in a state of becoming or gentle recovery. There's often the expectation that she'll be relieved of her phobia to water, which she eventually is - isn't she? The delicacy of focus also involves a constant suspense, or tension, or expectation, along with a sympathy. We're aware what Lina, or Cata, or Catarina is going through.
The film gets the severe-grading Mike D'Angelo's second highest score for the year, topped only by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Event Chime, now at Toronto facing competition from Arthur Harari's The Unknown. He says that the first half hour of The Currents "flirts with flawlessness," and that a scene toward the end is a front runner for his annual best scene competition. But obviously, he doesn't feel that the mid section quite holds up to the excellent early and late sections. This highlights that The Currents seeks to sustain a continual effect, that it's in some danger of losing that, subdividing into parts when that's not the intention. It is, in a sense, saying the same thing over and over again, making the same observation continually, a little differently, not relieving Lina's water phobia till the last moment. That's hard to do.
We are told she is a fashion designer, that she dove into a freezing lake in Geneva, and that it was a suicide attempt after receiving an award and tossing it away. Those things aren't always foremost, but what's clear is that she's not the same after that, no longer able to be or feel normal at anything. Since she doesn't speak much but we are constantly observing her, a lot resides in the face and manner of the actress, González-Sola, which is open, vulnerable, a little blank. Reviewers have also described it as "solemn" and "unnerving"; as, in lingering shots, evoking the face in a pre-Raphaelite painting (the glow, the red lips, the elaborate, long, wavy hair). There is much attention to the hair, how she is going to care for it if she can't wash it, how she shall wear it: it's important hair, problematic hair.
Lina returns to Argentina to her hotshot, now baffled husband (Esteban Bigliardi) and normal, puzzled little girl (Emma Fayo Duarte) and continues to just not act normal any more, if she ever did. (The little girl points out she never cooks like her schoolmates' mothers and that was always true). The actress' style is ineloquence and understatement Intricately layered.
In a detailled, admriring Variety review Guy Lodge points to the "selectively amplified sound design" that is combined at times with "lush, lapping intrusions of classical music" that show Lina sometimes living wholly in her own head and sometimes "dissociatively out of it," glimpsing herself as a stranger through a glass store window. Lodge admires the "sinister languor of the film’s pacing," and "the uncannily smooth textures and rich oil-paint accents of DP Gabriel Sandru’s lensing" — "briefly suggesting a reality cracked in two." Lodge mentions Hitchcock's Marnie and Todd Hayes' Safe as logical comparisons. Better if we can, though, to stay with the Argentine milieu of this very particular, stylish, cool Argentine-Swiss filmmaker whose work we shall like to see more of in future. Meanwhile watch this. Don't miss it.
The Currents/Las corrientes, 104 mins., premiered at TIFF Sept. 8, 2025, showing also at other festivals including Busan, Hamburg, Chicago, New York, Vienna, Thessaloniki, Lisbon, Sydney. and Melbourne. Limited US theatrical release May 29, 2026. Now streaming subscription platforms like Kino Film Collection and Kanopy (where it is available to stream for free). Metacritic rating: 79%.