Everyone knows what you mean when you describe a film as “a character study,” but I’d like to expand on that genre descriptor to include a new subcategory: the character mystery. Many festival-circuit dramas operate as alienating character studies of inscrutable people—especially women—that the audience must puzzle through only to vaguely understand. The first time this occurred to me was during the local premiere of Red Rooms at the Overlook Film Festival; the film has since been heralded as an era-defining digi voyeurism thriller, but I spent the entire runtime thinking, “Okay what is this woman’s deal???” while each of the protagonist’s peculiar character traits were revealed one scene at a time. Since then, it has occurred to me that there are many great films of the “What is this woman’s deal???” variety, including such classics as Todd Haynes’s Safe, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Christian Petzoldt’s Undine, and the majority of Isabelle Huppert’s filmography. Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents is just the latest addition to that character-mystery canon, an Argentinian variation in the national tradition of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman.

We meet our mystery character outside of her usual environment. Isabel Aimé González Sola plays an Argentinian artist accepting an industry award while abroad in Switzerland, then immediately jumping off the nearest bridge in a shockingly nonchalant suicide attempt. When describing this incident to her sister back in Argentina, she confesses, “I fell into the water,” absolving herself of cause or intent. What we’ve come to learn about her by that point is that she feels fully disconnected from her body and her life, stuck in a constant dissociative state that alienates her from friends, family, and colleagues. A new wrinkle to that feeling is that the bridge “accident” has left her terrified of any & all contact with water, associating the flow of a river’s currents with the ceaseless allure of The Void. She describes her current state as existing in “suspended time,” as she lives out the lyrics of DEVO’s “Out of Syc” while drifting from one social or professional obligation to another. Seemingly, the only thing keeping her from jumping back into The Void is concern for her young daughter, and even that earthly tether is wearing thin.

In one of the most intriguing sequences, our dazed mystery woman is hypnotized by a lighthouse bulb and dissociates for several minutes while imagining the urban domestic scenarios playing out on the city streets below. We might as well assume that she’s under hypnosis for the entire runtime, as every mundane activity that fills her day registers an out-of-body experience, from bath time with the kiddo to passive-aggressive squabbles with the mother-in-law. As a result, we have a less solid sense of who she is than we have of the fluid state she finds herself drowning in. She is, herself, the mystery; all the audience can relate to or repel from is the familiarity of the undefined feeling she’s suffering through. I may have set expectations a little too high in that opening paragraph by likening The Currents to so many cinephile-approved masterworks, since its scene-to-scene payoffs are decidedly quiet & lowkey. It’s a strangely calming experience for what’s effectively a psychological thriller, often pausing its story beats for a quiet stroll through an art museum or a couture photo shoot or a VR headset rainstorm. It’s a mystery without a resolution, designed with the clean lines & jewel tones of a fashion catalog spread instead of more typical psych-thriller mise-en-scène. In that sense, it’s best recommended to fashion-forward fans of The Headless Woman; just because you’re a headless enigma doesn’t mean you can’t pull off a lewk.

-Brandon Ledet