'The Currents' Courtesy of TIFF Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment The venerable but overcrowded "unraveling woman" subgenre gets a shot in the arm with The Currents (Las Corrientes), a lush, hypnotic character study from Swiss-Argentinian filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler. Conjuring the troubled inner life of Buenos Aires fashion designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) with an uncommon mix of stylistic rigor and feeling, it's a work of impressive, at times thrilling, assurance from start to finish. A bow at TIFF and a slot in the main slate of the New York Film Festival should help put the movie's gifted writer-director on the radar of cinephiles, arthouse distributors and programmers alike. Related Stories Movies 'Eternity' Review: Elizabeth Olsen Navigates a Post-Mortem Love Triangle in Pensive, Charming A24 Comedy Movies 'Couture' Review: Angelina Jolie Explores Her Vulnerability in a Vacuum in Alice Winocour's Wispy Mood Piece The Currents The Bottom Line A transfixing existential mystery. Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Platform)Cast: Isabel Aimé Gonzalez-Sola, Esteben Bigliardi, Claudia Sanchez, Ernestina Gatti, Jazmin Carballo, Patricia Mouzo, Susana Saulquin, Emma Fayo DuarteWriter-director: Milagros Mumenthaler 1 hour 44 minutes Lina's beauty and privilege - her flashy career, sleek apartment, successful spouse and adorable child - put her in the company of outwardly enviable, inwardly tormented female protagonists from Rosemary Woodhouse to Lydia Tár to whomever Nicole Kidman happens to be playing at the moment; she may also remind you of women in films by Bergman, Buñuel, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Todd Haynes and Milagros' Argentinian contemporary Lucrecia Martel. But The Currents never comes off as derivative. The elegance and, especially, empathy with which Mumenthaler captures the gaping chasm between how we present and who we are gives the film a voluptuous pull all its own. The movie's originality indeed stems from its refusal to stick to the playbook of chilly formalism followed by so much contemporary art cinema. If The Currents looks, at first, to be headed down a punishing path, its most surprising quality is its generosity, its aversion to cheap shocks, button-pushing or finger-wagging about - snore - the moral rot eating away at modern society. That's not to say this story of a woman whose flawless façade barely cracks even as her insides crumble doesn't fray your nerves. (It does). But it also stirs your emotions, deploying bold colors, an immersive soundscape that mingles a spectrum of ambient noise with surges of classical music, and a lead performance of riveting translucency. The Currents opens with 34-year-old Lina accepting an award in Geneva. Surrounded by admiring colleagues, she's the picture of radiant graciousness. Cut to Lina alone in the bathroom, where she briefly sizes up her trophy before sliding it into the trash. Out for a walk, Lina ends up striding across a bridge and then, without pause, jumping into the churning river below. Mumenthaler and DP Gabriel Sandru film the incident in long shot, shrewdly depriving us of psychological clues that a tighter frame might have telegraphed. Lina is rescued, soon returning home to 5-year-old daughter Sofia (Emma Fayo Duarte) and suave husband Pedro (the appealingly lupine Esteban Bigliardi). Like much in her life, her marriage looks good on paper: Pedro is a reliable parenting partner, an attentive lover, and seems concerned about Lina's mental wellness. But there's a shiver of possessiveness in his bearing, something the filmmaker suggests through subtle means like a lingering glimpse of Pedro's hand gripping Lina's desk. What nobody knows is that since Lina's near-drowning in Switzerland, she has been suffering from an extreme aversion to water. Unable to bathe, she breaks out in a rash on her scalp and neck - though Mumenthaler prudently doesn't turn Lina's furtive scratching and greasy hair into a body-horror gimmick, or box her into a story about a single phobia. Lina's new fear is just the most concrete manifestation of a larger malaise, a kind of paralyzing, terror-inflected numbness. The filmmaker makes deft use of visual and auditory cues to evoke this fugue-like sense of estrangement. She cranks the volume on background noise (construction drilling, a hairdryer, the clackity clack of a sewing machine, the bleeping of a video game), creating a cacophonous soundtrack that both echoes and exacerbates Lina's dysregulated headspace. A close-up of Lina's luscious locks cascading over the back of the sofa is held a few extra beats, until it takes on an alien quality - an eerie image of disembodiment. Still, Lina continues to go through the motions at work and at home. Notably, she has turned neither frigid nor vampirically horny, reflecting