When famous actors decide to try their hand at filmmaking, the results can be — and often are — unremarkable by design. Timid and safe with a network TV aesthetic that screams “I’m a lot more afraid behind the camera than I am in front of it.” Not so of Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water.” Not in the slightest. Some movies are shot. This one was directed.
Which isn’t to suggest this aggressively fragmented adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir should be graded on a curve because its famous auteur dared to film on 16mm, or even because she had the skill required to adapt her source material with the same febrile porousness that made it such a striking piece of literature in the first place (a process that required the “Clouds of Sils Maria” star to invent her own language of elliptical thoughts and extreme close-ups). On the contrary, I only make note of the laziest presumptions that people might create for Stewart’s debut because of the visceral fearlessness with which she defies them.
There isn’t a single millisecond of this movie that doesn’t bristle with the raw energy of an artist who’s found the permission she needed to put her whole being into every frame, messy and shattered as that might be. And it’s largely for that reason why “The Chronology of Water” works even when it doesn’t: Because, on an almost subatomic level, Stewart communes with the liquid spirit of a woman who only became whole by allowing herself to dissolve into the smallest essences of her being — over and over again until it seemed impossible she might ever regain a recognizable shape.
As Lidia puts it: “In water, like in books, you can leave your life.” And writing, like swimming — which she aspired to do on an Olympic level until drugs and alcohol put the kibosh on all that — becomes another body for her. It’s a metamorphosis that Stewart depicts with a refreshing lack of metaphor, as her script, a constellation of scattered quotes and half-invented memories, all but literalizes how Lidia (Imogen Poots) disassociates from her sexually abusive father in 1970s San Francisco.
At one point toward the end of the film, an elegant transition makes it appear as though Lidia’s skin is being washed away by a receding wave. More often than not, however, “The Chronology of Water” opts to anchor its visual poetry in the more primal terms of Lidia’s narration. Molested after one of the film’s rare snippets of swimming, Lidia tries to masturbate the pain away. “All I thought was my own wide-open cunt was as open as a mouth screaming,” she says before awing at her own ability to ejaculate. Cut to: Lidia drawing a smiley face with the condensation from an airplane window, as water comes to represent freedom from pain in three different ways across the span of a single sequence.
Stewart palpably delights in the button-pushing frankness of it all, and in exposing so many of the things that women are told to keep hidden (many of them considerably less fun than an orgasm), but her confrontational zeal always runs second to the fluidity of her feeling. That proves crucial to the flow of a linear but highly permeable film that moves forward through time like water through a fishing net, catching whatever real or invented memories are big enough to get stuck in the mesh.
There are no establishing shots, no time-identifying title cards, and only a handful of snippets that last long enough to be described as a scene; one minute Lidia is screaming at her college boyfriend for being too nice, as if he should have intuited that she only understood love through the veil of abuse, and the next she’s enduring one of life’s hardest moments with her older sister (Thora Birch) at her side. There she is at the University of Oregon, where “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey (a beautifully cast Jim Belushi) teaches her that “shit floats, but cream rises.” And there she is writing her own stuff, newly empowered to make something more of her trauma than her trauma has wanted to make of her.
It all proceeds in order, because “A chronology comforts us that we may soon get to a real place,” but the film’s jagged stream of blunt zooms, hard cuts, and kaleidoscopic color swatches make it seem as though that place will have to be invented — a sense of self that Lidia will similarly have to piece together from a million broken shards. Much is made of the notion that Lidia is inventing her own truth, and that some of what we see might not be rooted in what Werner Herzog might call the accountant’s reality. “Memories are stories,” she says at the very start, “so you better come up with one you can live with.” Also: “When there are no words for your pain, let your imagination change what you know.” Stewart doesn’t make any distinction between fact and fiction, which only rankles in that we don’t know how Lidia is allowing that change to occur, but Poots’ remarkable performance is so grounded in truth it probably wouldn’t matter if we did.
“The Chronology of Water” can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy. It’s the way her eyes narrow at the sight of something she wants, and the way she spits the word “family” through her teeth like a curse, and the way her whole body shudders with laughter during the most darkly comic moment of Lidia’s entire life on a beach with her first husband; Poots makes every look, move, and gesture feel as alive with feeling as the skin on your legs when you first jump into a swimming pool. “You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water,” Yuknavitch wrote in her book, but Poots brings the same revealing intensity to everything she does here — nothing is hidden, and even the lies are true.
The honesty of her performance turns out to be a safety net for a movie whose heroine’s emotions are so big, and her thoughts so visceral, that sometimes it seems like there isn’t any room for our own. The sheer intensity that Stewart endows into every beat creates a wave-less rhythm that can make it hard to ride the peaks and valleys of Lidia’s story, and there are stretches of the movie where I felt like it was taking all my strength just to tread water. But Poots makes so much seem possible just by staying afloat, and Stewart’s film — buoyed by her radical commitment to her own voice as an artist — allows “The Chronology of Water” to exalt in everything that bubbles up to the surface.
Grade: B+
“The Chronology of Water” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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