‘The Chronology of Water’ review: Changing tides

Kristen Stewart makes a great first impression as a director with the challenging, dreamlike nature of The Chronology of Water.

The Chronology of Water adapts American author Lidia Yuknavitch’s bold memoir in an equally-bold directorial debut for Kristen Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay. In a career-best performance, Imogen Poots plays the author onscreen as a frozen, terrified, quiet teenage girl stuck through the years that it took to become her full adult self after battling addiction and healing from child abuse.

Along the way, Lidia rides herself hard and puts herself away wet as an adult who swings so far to the other side of self-expression that she risks complete oblivion. Eventually her writing stabilizes the way that she navigates the world and channels her wildness. The Chronology of Water’s abstract visual language is reminiscent of Train Dreams lyrical and picturesque montages except punk, raw, and jagged.

Rough waters.

No one will ever be able to claim that Stewart and Poots played it safe with The Chronology of Water. Poots had a busy 2025 appearing in All of You and Hedda, but Lidia is her most challenging character. While she still looks like herself, she transforms her demeanor to such a degree that she seems unrecognizable. In the first act, while Lidia is still under her father’s roof, costume designer Liene Dobraja dresses the character in orange t-shirts and swimsuits to show how she is a prisoner desperate to escape. Poots initially only lets her eyes show any spark of rebellion as the rest of her seems expressionless to reflect Lidia’s stillness in the face of a predator: her father Mike (Michael Epp).

Most filmmakers are terrified of making a woman protagonist unlikable, but Poots and Stewart fearlessly dive headfirst into the challenge. As Lidia gets more freedom from her father, her swimsuit changes to red, white and blue stripes. Lidia becomes reckless, loses her college swim scholarship, and prioritizes a hedonistic lifestyle. Once she finds her voice, she never loses it again, even when it might’ve been easier for those around her who didn’t contribute to her horrific origin story and had to steel themselves from her abrasive loudness.

Lidia reclaims her body in ways that seem self-destructive from the outside and abuses others, and a lot of The Chronology of Water shows it. The narration reveals her reflections on each stage of her life, but do not expect to be spoon-fed. Nowhere in the film is it explained that Lidia treats her first husband (Earl Cave) like crap because his niceness or passivity is so unlike her childhood, and she’s trying to provoke a reaction. Chaos can be comfortable. It also does not explain why as adults, Lidia and her sister (Thora Birch) still hang out with their dreadful dad. When he reappears occasionally, it feels surreal, but it’s not a hallucination or a nightmare.

Sound & vision.

Like Die My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Chronology of Water is not an easy watch and is often more challenging because of the subject matter. The protagonist’s experience is so innately hard to watch because even though child sexual abuse is not explicitly depicted, the implication is unimaginable. Stewart pairs sound with imagery in an oneiric, roughly chronological way that rejects linearity. The visual language is more like a stream of consciousness with memories bleeding into each other and the present to show how one event is reminiscent of another.

The sound of whipping overlaps with counter-intuitive images mostly focusing on parts of the faces to show the reaction of the beaten and witnesses, thus avoiding prurient moviegoers looking for titillation and learning the wrong lesson. For instance, a swimming trophy has blood dripping down its legs while sounds of a coach spanking girls on a swim team for weight gain shows that the misogynistic abuse does not end at home and elicits counterintuitive reactions from the abused. While consensual sexual situations are shown on screen, the sound is more graphic than the images.

During the height of Lidia’s substance-altered years, editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm increases the pace of cutting away and creating montages. Stewart borrows some Ari Aster rapid cuts from day to night and day to night, but it conveys communion instead of horror. It shows how long it takes to find the person that gets you and how eternal it is regardless of how fleeting and brief.

Lidia’s writing progress gives opportunities for the narrative to jump backwards in time and images shown earlier become more than flashes. The Chronology of Water gradually reveals the clip’s context to create a cohesive whole. It’s hard to make writing interesting on screen, but Stewart makes it seem violent and urgent: the sound of pencil carving words into paper, the cracking of the pencil tip from the forcefulness of Lidia’s grip and rage, and the extreme closeness to show the words as the narration reads them.

The bottom line.

The Chronology of Water ends on its most approachable note: another disaster and settling in to recovery and stability. Poots verges on breaking the fourth wall as she grows in confidence and finds words less confronting and staggering for the listener and moviegoer to absorb. It’s a well-earned happy ending before Stewart plunges into closing credits that’s a healthy mix of counterintuitive summary of came before with a music video feel. Stewart can quit her day job and stay behind the camera if she chooses after making a film that refuses to make a life palatable for consumption, remains devoutly faithful to the person and her words when translating them into images.

The Chronology of Water is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Les Films du Losange. Read more articles by Sarah G. Vincent here.