‘The Currents’ and ‘The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future’ Find Transformation Beneath the Surface
There are some films that ask you to suspend your disbelief. And then there are films that make you question whether disbelief was ever necessary in the first place. Though The Currents and The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future come from very different places and tell very different stories, both inhabit that wonderfully strange space where reality gives way to something more mysterious. In each, water becomes a catalyst for transformation, opening a door to buried memories, family secrets, and the possibility of renewal.
Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents begins with a seemingly inexplicable impulse. While in Switzerland to accept an award for her work as a fashion designer, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) suddenly jumps from a bridge into an icy river. She survives, but when she returns home to Buenos Aires, she is no longer the same person.
Lina tells no one about what happened. Instead, she begins to withdraw from the life she once inhabited so comfortably. Her relationship with her husband (Esteban Bigliardi) becomes strained, her career loses its meaning, and her fear of water grows increasingly paralyzing. What initially seems like an isolated incident gradually reveals itself as something deeper, forcing Lina to confront questions about the person she has become and the life she has built.
Mumenthaler approaches Lina’s unraveling with an appropriately dreamlike sensibility. Reality begins to feel porous, with hallucinations and surreal images slipping into the everyday. Water follows Lina even after she has left the river behind, becoming a recurring reminder of the moment that divided her life into before and after.
If The Currents uses water to plunge inward, Francisca Alegría’s The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future uses it to bring something back to the surface. The film opens in a river in southern Chile, where fish are dying from pollution caused by a nearby factory. Among their floating bodies, the long-deceased Magdalena (Mía Maestro) suddenly emerges from the water, gasping for air.
Her return sets off a chain reaction within her family. Magdalena’s widowed husband is thrown into turmoil, while her daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) returns to the family’s dairy farm with her children. What follows is part family drama, part fable, and part magical realist meditation on the ways grief and old wounds can linger across generations.
Alegría fills the film with an unusual sense of wonder. Animals seem to observe the human drama unfolding around them, nature becomes inseparable from the family’s story, and moments of humor sit alongside grief and uncertainty. Magdalena’s resurrection isn't treated as a puzzle to be solved. Instead, her return creates an opportunity for the people she left behind to confront what has remained unresolved.
The Currents and The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future share a fascination with transformation and the forces that exist just beyond our understanding. Lina emerges from the water alive but fundamentally changed, while Magdalena returns from it after death to change the lives of those around her. In both films, water becomes more than a setting—it is a threshold between what was and what might come next.
Perhaps that is what makes these two films such natural companions: neither is interested in drawing a firm line between the real and the impossible. Instead, both suggest that transformation can come from the places we least expect it, whether through a moment of crisis, a return from the dead, or the mysterious forces of the natural world.
Stream The Currents and The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future now on Kino Film Collection.
The Currents (2026)
While visiting Switzerland to accept an award for her work in the fashion industry, Argentinian designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) is seized by the sudden urge to jump off a bridge into an icy river. She survives the plunge and returns to Buenos Aires; she tells no one of the incident, yet a transformation has taken place within her. Left with a paralyzing fear of water, Lina finds it impossible to readjust to her former identity as a wife, mother, and artist. She distances herself from her husband (Esteban Bigliardi) and career, growing increasingly isolated and fragile as she confronts long buried existential questions. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, The Currents is a quietly gripping psychological mystery with dreamlike, hallucinatory threads that weave a portrait of a woman on the verge of unraveling.
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (2023)
Singing cows, fish, and bees introduce a world of magical realism in this stunning Sundance hit. Long-dead Magdalena (Mía Maestro) surfaces in a polluted river, bringing with her a wave of family secrets that send her widowed husband and daughter (Leonor Varela) into turmoil. This lyrical film offers an ambitious proposal for healing, suggesting that the dead return when they are most needed.