The Chronology Of Water

A hot, wet mess of a movie about a hot, wet mess of a woman, actor-turned-filmmaker Kristen Stewart's feature directing debut is a sense-blitzing rollercoaster ride that leaves a giant damp patch on the sheets behind it. The Chronology Of Water is based on Lidia Yuknavitch's 2011 unorthodox memoir of the same name, which won multiple prizes and a devoted cult following. The book freewheels through its author's life in a lyrical, emotionally raw, stream-of-conscious manner that Stewart aims to replicate on screen using a non-linear narrative, sense-scrambling visuals, dreamy voice-over, disruptive sound design and extensive quick-fire edits. Bodily fluids, menstrual blood and intense close-ups of female flesh are recurring motifs.

While tolerance levels for this kind of self-consciously arty style will vary, it is hard to fault the fizzing ambition and high-voltage energy that K-Stew and her team bring to the party. Shooting on 16mm film, they consistently find a grainy, hazy, narcotic beauty in even the darkest material. Stewart reportedly fought for years to get this left-field passion project made, but her solid indie-movie credentials and queer icon status should ensure it finds a healthy audience, especially with Ridley Scott's heavyweight name among the executive producer credits. Launched in Cannes, to mixed but broadly positive reviews, The Chronology Of Water enjoyed its Polish premiere at Warsaw Film Festival this week.

Imogen Poots does some of the most muscular work of her career to date as the adult Lidia. Her livid, kinetic lead performance requires her to age across three decades, her damaged, self-destructive heroine pushing the limits of audience empathy to breaking point. Lidia's teens are dominated by a sexually and physically abusive father (Michael Epp) and the depressive, boozy mother (Susannah Floood) who turns a blind eye to his creepy mistreatment of their two daughters. Aftershocks from this family horror story ripple throughout her later life, often in queasy ways, such as when Lidia masturbates to the memory of her father's touch. This is taboo subject matter, but sensitively handled and rooted in the awkward reality of sexual trauma, not in prurient shock tactics.

A promising swimmer, Lidia escapes to college in Texas on a scholarship, but self-medicating with sex, drugs and alcohol proves too tempting an alternatives to sporting glory. A stormy romance with a fellow student (Earl Cave, son of rock singer Nick), whose gentle manner Lidia cruelly mocks, culminates in an ill-advised marriage and a tragic stillborn baby. Love affairs with men and women follow, plus a therapeutic BDSM interlude with a dominatrix (musician Kim Gordon, formerly of alt-rockers Sonic Youth) which plays into the story's undercurrents of discipline versus chaos, controlled self-abuse versus powerless victimhood. Eventually finding a kind of domestic stability in Oregon with her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch), who previously protected her from the worst of their father's abuse, Lidia slowly finds her artistic voice by sharing her painful secrets at public readings and writers' support groups.

The real Yuknavitch formed friendships with other Oregon writers, including veteran counterculture icon Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. In the late 1980s she was part of Kesey's student writing group, collaborating on the committee-written experimental novel Caverns. This episode appears in the film, with Jim Belushi on avuncular form as Kesey, the original Merry Prankster, fulfilling a more positive father figure role in Lidia's life. Yuknavitch is also friendly with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, who encouraged her to write The Chronology Of Water.

Uncharitable viewers might dismiss The Chronology Of Water as style over substance, with its pretentious chapter headings, relentlessly self-absorbed anti-heroine and hipster-friendly fashion-shoot aesthetic. There are certainly more loopy digressions and sense-scrambling visuals than firm narrative co-ordinates about location, time period or character motivation. But then again, this is not a conventional biopic. Once you acclimatise to its crazy-paving rhythms, there is emotional depth and cinematic technique at work, notably as a highly stylised evocation of fractured memory and unresolved trauma. If the best debut features leave a powerful impression, like a punch in the face, Stewart unquestionably makes a big splash.

The Chronology Of Water will be released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 6 February 2026.

Reviewed on: 17 Oct 2025