‘The Chronology of Water’ Review: Kristen Stewart Dives Into Trauma and Transformation
The actress directs this adaptation of writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, which recounts her harrowing family and personal experiences. Featuring Imogen Poots and Thora Birch.
Not long ago, Kristen Stewart served on the jury of a major film festival, and colleagues from that experience spoke admiringly of her sharp, perceptive readings of the films she watched. That reputation lingers while watching The Chronology of Water, her feature debut—a film that’s decidedly not the typical “actor-turned-director” calling card. Though it contains many of the traumatic elements that define a certain type of family psychodrama, and though it centers on a powerhouse lead performance, Stewart’s adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir feels more like the work of a diligent film-school graduate steeped in experimental shorts than that of someone who has spent years on studio sets.
A broken memoir about a broken person, The Chronology of Water pieces together Lidia’s life through fragments, vignettes, recollections, and shades of autofiction. The film traces her harrowing journey from childhood to a turbulent adulthood, anchored by Imogen Poots, who plays Lidia throughout her adult life, whatever her age is meant to be. A kind of female Bukowski—an abused child turned competitive swimmer, unrecoverable alcoholic, damaged soul, and brilliant writer—Lidia filters her experiences through prose, while Stewart translates them into imagery often paired with a gravelly voiceover.
The film initially unfolds as a mosaic of details, almost literary in texture: hair blowing in the wind, running water, blood on skin, an unfamiliar hand, a stained wall. Shifting speeds and formats—the film is shot largely on 16mm, sometimes mimicking the look of Super 8—give the impression of an experimental short made by someone who has seen plenty of ’60s underground cinema and wants that affinity noticed. And although that aesthetic persists across the film’s rather hefty 128-minute runtime, the rhythm gradually evolves. More traditional scenes emerge, dialogue takes shape, and the scraps of Lidia’s life—its traumas, its tensions, its fleeting moments of happiness, especially those that happen in water—slowly reorganize into something more recognizable.
The story includes an abusive, violent father (Michael Epp); a loving but physically and emotionally battered mother unable to defend herself (Susannah Flood); a sister who runs away to survive (Thora Birch, as an adult); and Lidia, who does what she can to endure, carving out a private world through obsessive journaling as a way to survive the family’s toxic dynamic. She becomes a swimmer, a college student, an alcoholic, a sex addict, a self-described “difficult” person who stumbles from crisis to crisis, with only occasional glimmers of kindness or hope—and her scribbled notebooks—as lifelines that convert anguish into art.
At times, The Chronology of Water feels overwhelmingly bleak, almost punishing, a catalog of pain that can be as exhausting as it is affecting. But Stewart’s approach invites viewers to experience these moments from shifting angles—not as pronouncements, but as sensations, as fleeting presences. Clear timelines and contexts are rare; much is filmed in tight, almost claustrophobic close-ups. Yet the audience remains inside Lidia’s raspy, restless stream of consciousness—remembering, thinking, imagining. And Poots ensures that the film’s indulgences in aestheticized pain—blood, bodily fluids, death—never feel like mere stylistic exercises. The suffering remains rooted in a person, not in a trope.
Though it seems improbable that this intensity could be sustained for two full hours, later chapters—each focusing on a different period of Lidia’s life—offer a more manageable narrative mode. As Lidia discovers herself as a writer—through classes with Ken Kesey, early publications, and teaching jobs—the film escapes, if only momentarily, the loop of repeatedly confronting the same wounds. Stewart assembles a life from shards: painful but also literary, merging fact with questionable recollection and likely invention. And throughout, water is there—within the chaos, around the pain—a protective layer between Lidia and the world, the one place where she can float, breathe, and survive.
