Critic Reviews

Instead of an exercise in alienation, Mumenthaler and her star, Isabel Aimé Gonzalez Sola, create a far richer search for self that effortlessly blends the psychological, existential and sociological.

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 give the film a voluptuous pull all its own.

While The Currents can certainly be read as a portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, it also offers a more expansive view of mental illness as a sensitivity not wholly pathological, but rather capable of reframing and refreshing the world.

Lina is one of the most compelling characters in cinema this year. In González-Sola’s raw, grounded portrayal, we find a woman doing everything she can to mask her struggle.

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

Ms. Mumenthaler has constructed her character study with subtly expressionistic imagination, deploying an enveloping, finely tuned sound design and finding a transporting musical motif in Holst’s “The Planets.” One daring sequence toward the end offers a vivid panorama beyond this woman’s world.

This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction

Mumenthaler doesn’t want to give us the answers––she just wants us to wade through it and find our own way to shore.

Mumenthaler’s oblique off-center approach makes “Currents” a strangely mesmerizing work, and up until almost the very end, its mysteries remain intact.

Mumenthaler’s screenplay works best when it lives and breathes in the ambiguities of Lina’s malaise and dissatisfaction, and how she balances it with her responsibilities as an entrepreneur, wife, and devoted mother. Splitting the difference between its more lyrical touches with more straightforward storytelling saps some of the power out of the film.