Isabel Aimé González Sola as Lina
Milagros Mumenthaler’s debut film “Back to Stay” 2011. (Abrir Puertas y Ventanas) was warmly received in the festival circuit with a clutch of prestigious awards. Mumenthaler was born in Argentina in 1977. Fearing the newly-installed Military Regime, her parents moved to Switzerland where she grew up but her heart always yearned for her roots in Argentina.
With three feature films and a number of successful shorts under her belt, all her films carry a sense of the intrigue, or even the guilt of not having been present during the Dirty War, where family friends disappeared or were badly affected. Perhaps this accounts for Mumenthaler’s movies expressing a deep interest in certain recurring themes enveloped with a prevalent sensation of absence.
In THE CURRENTS, Mumenthaler expresses a fascination with internal trauma as Lina, the protagonist, struggles to understand and overcome the profound existential vacuum that opens up inside her, leading to her subsequent PTSD and depression. Consciously avoiding any exposition or voice-overs, Mumenthaler has created a minimalist film using bare hints, detail and sometimes baffling actions, to express the character’s turmoil. Artist, wife and mother Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) suffers a fairly cataclysmic and unexpected breakdown while in Geneva to receive an award. Suddenly unable to cope, she suffers an inexplicable crisis during which she dumps her award in the bin, walks aimlessly around the city and suddenly throws herself from a bridge into the freezing river on a sudden impulse. It is only the thought of her much-loved daughter Sofía (a lovely performance from Emma Rayo Duarte), that leads her to save herself.
Unable to comprehend her own actions, Lina is drawn to conceal her distress and pretend all is fine. But she has developed unexpected after-effects, such as a morbid fear of water, that stops her being able to carry on as normal, which she finds extremely hard to hide.
Mumenthaler has been consistent in how she likes to work, clearly expressed in an interview with Nina Scheu from Cine Europa in 2011, her comments are as relevant in 2025 as they were then: -
“I don’t believe in forced dialogues to inform viewers, so they understand more. I think you can say much more with a look and details, than with words. That’s rather the aim of the film: not forcing things. I like this kind of cinema and find it more interesting. For this film in any case. But you mustn’t force the unspoken either. You have to try to be fair with the characters…the original title was ‘Absence’. “
Milagros Mumenthaler writer and director
An interest in how people cope with emotional vulnerability permeates the film. The pace is deliberately slow and a lack of linear narrative has led to comments such as “… vague statements over and over again! (Ethan Vestby 2016). However, she does manage to convey a vital difference between sadness when people are able to communicate their pain, and depression, as in this case with PTSD, where the person feels totally alienated, separate, and totally unable to understand what they are going through, let alone connect and express it to anyone.
It is interesting in that the protagonist Lina has everything she could want, a successful career, a lovely family and yet suddenly she cannot find reason or purpose in her existence. The difficulties experienced by those close to her for acting “weird,” are also explored, as with everything in this film in a non—direct and oblique way, wrought with ambivalence, so that the smallest details take on significance. Lina struggles to understand her sudden emptiness, the vacuum created by her having somehow been swept into another universe of fears and hallucinations.
Lina lives but cannot feel alive- is she a mother, a woman, even a creative? So different from that of her androgynous assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) who has an independence of thought and confidence that Lina feels she has lost.
It has been said that Mumenthaler is influenced by Lucrecia Martel, perhaps due to how all that is vital and important is buried, concealed and hidden from view. Some metaphors accentuate the separation and how Lina’s sanity remains linked to powerful memories. She is fascinated by an embroidery of women sewing in a shop window in Geneva, and, later, we realize it reminded her of her own mother’s passion for embroidery, inevitably linked to the awareness of her mother’s disturbing mental fragility. This is a new look at how we deal with mental illness, and how one can overcome it.
THE CURRENTS is Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature. It premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival and is in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival 2025.
Writer/Director: Milagros Mumenthaler / Producers: Violeta Bava, David Epiney, Rosa Martínez Rivero, Eugenia Menthaler / DOP: Gabriel Sandru / Editor: Gion-Reto Killias / Sound:Carlos Ibañez Díaz, Federico Esquerro, Denis Séchaud and Marlène Vinocur /COMPANY: Alina Films/ Ruda Cine
Cast : Isabel Aimé González-Sola (LINA)/ Sara Bessio(NADIA) Esteban Bigliardi(PEDRO)/Jazmin Carballo (AMALIA) / Emma Fayo Duarte ( Sofía) /Claudia Sánchez (Inés)-
