Imogen Poots in The Chronology of Water.Supplied
The Chronology of Water
Directed by Kristen Stewart
Written by Kristen Stewart, based on the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
Starring Imogen Poots, Thora Birch and Jim Belushi
Classification N/A; 128 minutes
Opens at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Jan. 9
Critic’s Pick
In her 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch lays bare a heart-rending account of sexual abuse, addiction, sexuality, and child loss. Organized by the haphazard thrum of memory, Yuknavitch’s text is a deft, non-linear act of personal storytelling – with some fiction, as, by her own admission, she “lies” – set to the tune of watershed moments in her life, beginning with the event of a stillbirth and an abusive upbringing as a competitive swimmer. Water becomes the locus of Yuknavitch’s self-expression, making liquid what was once flesh and memory. “In water, like in books, you can leave your life,” she writes.
With her directorial debut, Kristen Stewart adapts Yuknavitch’s pages into an impressionistic, self-assured feature film, ripe with confrontation toward the woman’s biography on screen and sure to disturb unsuspecting viewers. After eight years in gestation – Stewart acquired the rights to the book in the mid-2010s, during which time she also directed the watery short film Come Swim – The Chronology of Water had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s splashy Un Certain Regard section in 2025.
In the film, Lidia (inhabited remarkably by Imogen Poots) grows from a teenager petrified of her predacious father (Michael Epp) into a flailing twentysomething dropout with a drug addiction and a fingerless-glove-wearing boyfriend, into the inadvertent mentee of countercultural novelist Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi), into a doctoral candidate and professor of literature. Lidia’s older sister Claudia (Thora Birch) plays a significant role in housing and caring for her during a tumultuous pregnancy and loss – a closeness cultivated through various bodily traumas, as Claudia was also subject to their father’s incessant abuse.
Stewart has fashioned herself one of this generation’s most fascinating performers, gaining notoriety with her early role in David Fincher’s Panic Room, ascending to meteoric fame as a teenager with The Twilight Saga and subsequently working with auteurs such as Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, and David Cronenberg. There’s also the matter of Stewart’s cultivated mythos, speculated upon by hordes of tweens and presidents alike for almost two decades.
A scene from The Chronology of Water.Supplied
In 2016, the film critic Melissa Anderson located Stewart’s genius, her “electrifying mutability,” in the actress’s quicksilver sexuality: “from extremely heteronormative to explicitly sapphic and all libidinal leanings in between.” With The Chronology of Water, Stewart’s sexuality (both in the sense of the sensual and the queer) yields images that are both intimate and caustic. Take, for instance, the erudite dominatrix (Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth) who, in a brisk montage, engages in BDSM acts with Lidia, subsequently breaking open her world view as a writer.
Shot by cinematographer Corey C. Waters on 16mm – at times sneakily designed to emulate Super 8mm film stock – the film toys with the analogue pleasures of movie- and memory-making. Chaptered by the liquid sequences of Yuknavitch’s book (“Holding Breath,” “Under Blue,” “The Wet,” “Resuscitations,” and “The Other Side of Drowning”), The Chronology of Water is a non-linear voyage through the synapses. As Yuknavitch writes, “let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end …”
Poots in The Chronology of Water.Supplied
What may read as fluid on the page can also be sharp, hard-edged, and bordered within the film frame, bound by editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s incendiary arrangement of rapid cuts, overlapping dialogue, and choppy, distorted audio. The resulting work is compassed by experimental film and literary practices, a formal trait that deepens the work’s engagement with the audience while also heightening its abrasive style. As Stewart put it, it’s “a movie that is super faithful to the book not because it’s obsessed with the details but because it’s obsessed with the form.”
In a sea of actors-turned-directors who contrive drab, visually unremarkable projects, Stewart’s tangly and deeply unsettling character study is almost beyond comprehension. At times damningly ambitious, The Chronology of Water continuously goes too far: drawing blood where other films merely gesture to it; relaying anxieties as they are, rather than organizing them into something intelligible. The film is tragic, but not piteous. Stewart, by way of Yuknavitch, understands that memory and cinema are both instruments of time, able to chronologize a life that lurches on – a work that is made and unmade with each breath, each cut.