The Chronology Of Water Review | A Visceral Study Of Self-Reclamation & The Architecture Of Trauma

Art-house cinema rarely finds easy resonance with broad audiences. Its appeal often lies in deliberately vague metaphors, stylistic visual flourish and characters whose complexity can feel both dazzling and forbidding. Though Kristen Stewart has directed several short films, this marks her first feature. Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, The Chronology of Water (2025) is a relentless excavation of a young woman’s existence, coloured by childhood abuse and subsequent traumas—laid bare in fragments that resist easy assembly. Though Yuknavitch structures her memoir into five acts within the book, she also immediately undermines the notion of linearity. “Chronology convinces us that we are moving to a real place”, she says. 

The film plunges the audience into the chaotic turbulence of its protagonist’s existence from the first frame. It begins with fragmented glimpses of a woman bleeding across disparate moments of her life. Each instance renders the blood with distinct textures—spreading across the bathroom floor before slipping into the drain, as if carrying its own remembrance and weight. Memory emerges as both burden and responsibility. The trailer offers a line that lingers long after: “Memories are stories, so you better come up with one you can live with.” Throughout the film, such reflections punctuate the narrative, offering fleeting reflections & traces of longing. 

Lidia, played by Imogen Poots, is haunted by the San Francisco home of her youth. She lives with her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch), her mother Dorothy (Susannah Flood) overcome by an alcohol addiction and a father (Michael Epp) whose screeching threats and acts of violence are glimpsed only in shadowed hints. As an aspiring olympic swimmer and an eloquent young girl, Lidia maps out every single escape route to become anyone or anything other than a child of this home. Though the film can be labelled a biopic, it defies conventional expectations of a life dissected on screen. Trauma, as presented through Lidia’s lens, is often puzzling, incomplete or even misremembered—precisely how it must dwell in her own mind.

Shot on 16 mm, the film unfolds in a deliberately trembling and abrasive visual register, as if offering sudden, unvarnished glimpses into Lydia’s inner life. Stinging closeups of bloody hands, hazy words and gripping images hover in surreal tension. Despite the constant awareness of the screen’s distance, the tactile approach of the camerawork strives to make memory feel immediately tangible. Language and water thus share this fluidity—both conveying what resists containment of her interiority. 

Stewart demands engagement at every level—inviting viewers to witness Lidia’s trauma, decipher the cryptic rhythms of her life and all the while remaining present, without any respite. The work occasionally carries the air of an eager film-school synthesis—an aesthetic fascination with this artsy, fragmented visual language that suits the memoir’s intimate scope yet sometimes falters in ever snapping out of it. The entire film is bathed in these rapid cuts, narrations and double-exposure video clips—sometimes unintentionally giving the style more prominence over material. 

Much rests on Poots’ performance, arguably the most commanding of her career. She embodies Lydia with an emotional intensity that is both precise and relentless. Cinema and society alike box women with abusive childhoods into a hypersexual cliché haunted by “daddy issues.” The film quietly dismantles that misogyny, extending empathy to those harmed by the man they are taught to trust first and most. It grants interiority and reads her decisions as adaptive patterns carried through a damaged lineage. It grants interiority and reads her decisions as adaptive patterns carried through a damaged lineage. Understandably, central to this film and her life is her father who is an architect, artist and athlete—simultaneously capable of creation and cruelty. It’s almost ironic how her father designs houses but theirs is a disintegrated one. 

The film does not explicitly depict sexual abuse yet its presence permeates every frame. Lidia drinks from a flask, surrenders to cocaine, moves through lovers of all genders in an attempt to grasp herself and her autonomy, yet any semblance of control remains elusive. The character’s spiraling self-sabotage registers as relentless heartbreak rendered in meticulous detail. Yuknavitch retains both tenderness and devastation for her father, illustrating how remembering him refuses simple binaries. It extends to the other relationships in her life, like her first husband Philip (Tom Sturridge), a sensitive folk musician. His calmness, passivity and quiet tenderness ignite her fury as she can’t stand to spend her life amidst his “niceness”. Stewart has also reflected in interviews, about the “hairline fracture of a fragile difference between pleasure and pain.” In this film, that fissure becomes a landscape of bleeding, becoming and reckoning.

The editing emerges as one of the film’s most compelling features. Its non-linear structure permits images to surface before their full meaning is clear, planting emotional markers that crystallize with later context. Yuknavitch witnessing her sister’s punishments triggers a prolonged, embodied silence, shaping her relationship with writing, desire and self-expression throughout her life. Language thus emerges as a bridge from isolation to connection, but the private act must meet the public. Through divorces, heartbreaks and tragedies, Lidia emerges as a woman choosing deservedness wholeheartedly. Tracing a passage from turbulent waters to prose and literature, Stewart’s film embraces Yuknavitch’s self-determined creation.

The intensity with which some viewers will respond to this film is understandable, contrarily the aversion of others as well. Its heavy reliance on voiceover steeped in poetic abstractions often drifts too indulgingly into self-consciousness. Instead of deepening empathy, it can alienate and leave the audience decoding-mode rather than fully inhabiting the emotional landscape. Stewart’s directorial instincts and clearly defined vision are evident yet the sprawling runtime does test patience. The Chronology of Water is at its heart a study of a woman gradually reclaiming authority over her body and her voice. The film treads the fine line between implication and exploitation—transforming Lydia into a fully realised character rather than a catalogue of suffering.