The Chronology of Water

Time Out

17-05-2025

Kristen Stewart reveals a deft directorial hand and a distinct, languid, echoing style in her vividly made, emotionally visceral exploration of the life and times of American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch.
Filmed on 16mm, split into five literary-style chapters across Lidia's life and matching the prose of the memoir it's adapted from, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, resilience, the dispelling of female shame, and gynephilic fascination. Yuknavitch is a woman who, by anyone's definition, has had more than her fair share of suffering. In her 2011 memoir, she recounts an upbringing in '80s Florida by a complicit mother and a sexually abusive father who continually raped both her and her older sister. She grows up to be a near-champion swimmer, but her past won't leave her alone.
Lidia – played by Imogen Poots as a straw-haired whirlwind who barrels into adult life with a vengeful desperation for freedom and a self-destructive desire for sensation – is a force of nature.
She develops substance abuse problems, flunks out of college, gets pregnant, suffers a devastating stillbirth; she flits between relationships with men and women, using sex and drugs to fill the void. And, most importantly, she writes her heart out, growing a career in the literary world both because – and in spite of – the whirling trauma of her memories.
Eventually, she finds some hard-won stability, through her writing most of all. All of these experiences are rendered by Stewart in patchwork-quilt style recollection; she uses discordant sound design and jumps between time and place at speed, aided by Poots' own alternately poetic and hard-edged voiceover. Water and wetness remain the central visual and thematic metaphor of the film throughout; not only because of the sexual inference or the salvation of the swimming pool for our protagonist. Stewart shows us how rivulets of memories flow into one another, pool in the crevasses and gullies of the mind and get stuck there; gush or roar with abrupt power.
It isn't always easy viewing, but neither is it an endurance test
Stewart's film lingers in the discomfort of a charged moment at the kitchen sink, or a seemingly innocuous soft paternal voice. Michael Epp is chilling as the clean-cut, bespectacled suburban dad with monstrous intent beneath his calm exterior, while Thora Birch, as Lidia's beleaguered older sister, has heartbreaking gravitas.
But it's Poots who carries the story, giving heart and soul to a performance of a woman who cannot help but careen her way through life like a bull in a china shop.
Given its tough subject matter, The Chronology of Water isn't always easy viewing. But neither is it an endurance test. The film does have its weaknesses – it's perhaps a bit overlong and risks repetition at times; it can become too caught up in its own imagery of blood and water and sweat. But Stewart is trying to visualise what Yuknavitch's writing explores, which is in part that what's between her legs has unfortunately been the great wound of her life. This 'pink muscle' that has been at the heart of her worst experiences of abuse and trauma. You could accuse that of being rote feminist anatomical chat; but The Chronology of Water deconstructs how women's bodies remain war zones, too often contested and battered and shamed. It tells us how trauma begets more trauma, and the painful, courageous process of turning it into art.