When the past returns

The Currents
2025, dir. Milagros Mumenthaler, 100 min.

Romería
2025, dir. Carla Simón, 115 min.

A woman wins a prize. We see this happening to her, maybe, in the way that she’s seeing it: from far away, under cold lights, surrounded by voices that make the sounds of words that don’t amount to much of anything. The woman walks out of the award ceremony, goes to the bathroom, washes her hands, and lets the small, elegant trophy with which she has just been presented fall into a trash can. Thud. She walks out of the building into an unnamed European city; she gets lost; she is lured into an antiques shop by an embroidered cloth hanging in the window. It depicts two women sewing. Through the window, we watch her chat with the shopkeeper. She buys the piece, which the shopkeeper wraps in paper and string. She walks out of the shop; she keeps walking. As she passes over a bridge, she lifts one leg, then the other, over the railing and lets her body fall into the water below. Thud. The parcel containing the embroidery floats on the surface of the lake.

This is what we learn of Lina (an arresting Isabel Aimé Gonzalez Sola) in the first handful of minutes of Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents, a film that continues in this dissociative tone as it follows its protagonist in her tenuous recovery from her self-inflicted trauma.

Is it self-inflicted, though? Where, exactly, did that fall come from? It wasn’t exactly a leap—Lina drops from the bridge as if pulled down into a tailor-made abyss. There was something there, magnetized, calling to some core part of her. Her arrival home in Buenos Aires is tense. Her husband (Esteban Bigliardi, taut and inscrutable) worries about her strange behavior but can’t seem to reach her wherever it is that she’s gone. Lina is shrouded in fear now—she can’t bring herself to touch water. Her mass of brown hair hangs down her back in increasingly greasy ropes, a liability in her field (fashion). She needs help. She turns to an old friend.

In Carla Simón’s Romería, the past similarly surfaces when a protagonist needs help. Marina (Llúcia Garcia, sweet and fresh and young), an eighteen-year-old filmmaker from Catalunya, needs to be recognized on her father’s death certificate to be able to apply for a scholarship to film school. She travels to Vigo, in Galicia, in search of some signatures and, maybe, some sense of what her parents’ life looked like when they got together, before she was born, before they both died. Marina—an apt name, as her father, we learn later, loved the sea—knows a little: her parents died of complications from AIDS; they used heroin; they lived in a tower near Vigo. But much has been concealed from her, both deliberately and as a result of physical and emotional distance. In one particularly affecting scene, the grandfather with whom she has been newly acquainted lines up his grandchildren from youngest to oldest to gently interrogate them about their behavior and hand them medium-sized bills. When Marina finally stands facing him, the old man, seated next to a desk, pulls out from a drawer an envelope fat with cash and beckons Marina to take it to pay for her studies and, more importantly, “to spare your grandmother a displeasure.” Marina hesitates—she needs a scholarship, she says, not this money—but ultimately accepts the envelope. The cash is meant to make the acknowledgement of the past unnecessary, to erase the facts that time makes into history.

But Marina insists. In the middle of the night, she ventures from the house boat on which she’s been staying with her uncle, aunt, and cousins, and returns the envelope, leaving it under an entry mat. She prompts her other uncle to tell her about her parents: where they lived, how they lived, how they died. She finds out she’s been lied to—her father died shortly before her mother did, when she was around five or six, not when she was a baby, as she had been told—and that her family have lied to themselves. For every fact she receives, she also encounters a denial or a blank. An old woman in the apartment building where her parents lived doesn’t remember them and laments that no one else will: the only other person who lived there at the same time has Alzheimer’s.

For Marina, the past is irrecoverable. She wants to return to the site of its unfolding, but she will never have been there in the way she wishes she could have. The camera, then, becomes for her a kind of panning sieve—not a way to rewrite the past, but to look for its traces in the present and vice versa. (The film shares much both thematically and formally with Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun [2022] and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron [2025].)

Marina is young, a person for whom where she comes from—her parents, their parents, their history—is still fundamentally constitutive of her self-conception. Lina is older; she is a professional and a wife; she is a daughter-in-law and a mother. Her self-conception is made up more of the choices she’s made than of those that were made on her behalf or in her proximity. When the past returns, it’s as a violent and abstract force. For a while she seems to have no choice but to run from it. When she finally does turn to her blinkered family history, the reconciliation returns Lina into a kind of wholeness, but it’s not one she wants to inhabit for long. The distance has been protective, and its attendant dissociation, which causes Lina to look at herself and at the lives of women around her as if through a pane of glass, productive. From within it, for a moment, Lina appears to be able to cast herself into previously unimaginable territory: the future.