“Will surely grip with its Hitchcockian tension and its hypnotic, dream-like rhythm.”

Playing in this year’s New York Film Festival’s Main Slate is Argentine director Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature film The Currents. The film tells the story of Catalina, a 34-year-old Argentine stylist who is at the height of her career and is in Switzerland to receive an award. Afterward, events unfold that bring up themes of mystery, trauma, and memories. Mumenthaler’s film is suspenseful and captivating, and for those who are on its wavelength, it will surely grip with its Hitchcockian tension and its hypnotic, dream-like rhythm.

Catalina, who goes by Lina (and sometimes Cata), seems unenthused or even displeased by the honor, and nonchalantly dumps the award into a bathroom trash bin. Later that night, she wanders the Swiss streets alone as the film invokes Vertigo through its atmosphere of psychological fracture and with its dramatic score. Lina eventually falls, or jumps, into a river. She later states that, as she was pulled under, she felt the currents dragging her away.

Lina doesn’t drown. She manages to crawl out of the freezing water, but something in her shifts. When she returns to Buenos Aires, she’s no longer the same. Her husband Pedro and her daughter Sofía both notice the change. Pedro tells her, “It’s like you never came back.” Lina is terrified of water, as she refuses to cook, to bathe her child, or to wash her own hair. What begins as the aftermath of a traumatic event soon curdles into a phobia that consumes her.

In order to wash her hair, she visits an old friend who sedates her with gas so that she can be unconscious during the process. It’s an extreme, almost absurd image of a stylist who doesn’t know what dry shampoo is yet undergoes sedation to have her hair cleaned. Mumenthaler commits to this surreal logic at the expense of, and perhaps with contempt for, her viewers. Later, Lina overdoses on the gas and has to be hospitalized. From there, her supposed “recovery” involves psychiatrists and virtual-reality therapy. 

Isabel Aimé González Sola gives a raw, deeply felt performance as Lina, in which every flicker of her face conveys her uneasy gaze and her detachment. The great actor Esteban Bigliardi is strong as Pedro, though the script mostly sidelines him. It’s González Sola’s film. She inhabits Lina’s disconnection with a precision that keeps even the most unbelievable scenes emotionally grounded.

Beneath the surface beauty lies the film’s biggest problem. Mumenthaler builds mystery through omission. We never learn why Lina is like this, or what triggered her collapse into the river. Was it an accident, an attempted suicide, or something more abstract? That ambiguity could have been powerful, but instead it becomes hollow. The film treats trauma and PTSD as a kind of ghost story or mystery, something that just happens without reason or context, as if it were a stylish metaphor instead of something lived and specific.

That hollowness becomes more harmful in the final act when Lina visits her mother, who appears to be OCD. It’s quite possible that Lina shares the same neurotype as her mother, but the film never explores this with any depth or nuance. Instead, Mumenthaler presents the mother’s condition as a simple visual shorthand of an organized, compulsive older woman who fears contamination and loves perfected organization; meanwhile she frames Lina’s behavior as a strange, almost supernatural manifestation of this same fear. She treats OCD with the most tired presentation, as an aesthetic quirk and a convenient plot tool, rather than a real, lived experience of complex human beings. 

The reduction of both OCD and PTSD is not only inaccurate but also deeply regressive. It feels as if Mumenthaler has taken her understanding of these conditions from Instagram and TikTok videos, instead of from neurodivergent people. This type of lazy and reductive representation isn’t just inaccurate; it reinforces harmful stereotypes. When these portrayals are presented in a serious drama like this, they can do more harm than good, especially to those already marginalized by misunderstanding and by a current political climate where neurodivergents are constantly being attacked and belittled. This is not representation. It’s recycling stereotypes under the guise of art-house subtlety, which reinforces harmful ideas that neurodivergents are erratic, irrational, and unknowable.  

This problem extends to how the film treats therapy. The psychiatrist is depicted as a distant technician who uses virtual-reality gimmicks to “fix” Lina’s brain, which echoes the same cold, clinical attitude that so many neurodivergent people encounter in real life. There’s no curiosity about how her mind actually works, no empathy for her sensory reality, but just a need to normalize her behavior so she can fit back into the mold of a functioning woman and mother. It’s ironic. In a film obsessed with currents, it refuses to flow toward any real understanding of the differences of minorities. 

Importantly, however, The Currents isn’t without power. There are visually stunning sequences and scenes. For instance, in one segment Sofia climbs to the top of a lighthouse to look down on the lives of others, and Lina joins her.  She sees different supporting characters of the film going about their daily routines. These sequences finally bring emotional weight and perspective and add much-needed narrative and plot to the otherwise meandering film. The score swells with Hitchcockian strings, and for a moment everything feels illuminated, as if the mystery of Lina’s distance has been transmuted into pure cinematic rhythm.  

Even with its flaws, The Currents is a film of immense atmosphere and control. Mumenthaler crafts a world that feels suspended between dream and reality, where emotion and memory move unpredictably and fluidly.  The precision of her framing and the tension between sound and silence recall Hitchcock, but the perspective is unmistakably her own. For many, the film will remain overly cryptic, beguiling, and even detached. But for others, especially those attuned to its mood and form, it will mesmerize as a haunting and elegant work.