The Chronology of Water (2025)

There’s a scene early on where Imogen Poots, playing the writer Lidia Yuknavitch, stands at the edge of a pool and simply looks at the water for what feels like too long. Nothing happens. Then everything does. That’s the film in miniature: patient until it isn’t, still until the currents underneath finally surface.

Kristen Stewart directs from her own script, adapting Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, and this is her first time behind the camera on a feature. Actors turned directors often overcorrect, either fussing over performance at the expense of shape or leaning so hard on mood that the story drowns in it. Stewart doesn’t. She trusts silence, and she trusts Poots to carry the weight of an abusive childhood, years of competitive swimming, addictions, and a slow, unglamorous climb toward becoming a writer, without ever asking the camera to explain her.

The synopsis sounds like grim provocation on paper: sexual abuse, addiction, a body used as both weapon and refuge. In lesser hands this becomes misery for its own sake. It doesn’t, here. Instead it becomes something closer to testimony, told out of order the way memory works, not the way plot usually insists on it, with water as the organising image rather than a decorative one.

Thora Birch and Tom Sturridge circle Poots without stealing focus, and Jim Belushi, cast against type as the novelist Ken Kesey, gets one scene of genuine tenderness that earns its quiet. Corey C. Waters shoots the pool sequences with a clarity that never tips into showing off, chlorine blue against skin, light refracted rather than romanticised. The score, by Paris Hurley, barely intrudes.

Where the film falters is structural. Stewart’s commitment to a fractured, non-chronological telling (the title all but announces this as the point) occasionally works against clarity rather than for it; two or three transitions in the second act land more confusing than resonant, and a first-time director’s instinct to trust the audience tips, briefly, into asking too much of it. I wanted one more anchor, a single scene that let me get my bearings before the next leap backward or forward. It never quite arrives.

That’s a real complaint. But it doesn’t sink the film, because what Stewart gets right, she gets right at a level well above what her debut status would suggest. This is a director who understands that trauma on screen doesn’t need to announce itself to land; restraint, here, does more work than a hundred more conventional films manage with volume turned all the way up. Poots gives one of the year’s better performances, unshowy and exact.

I left the cinema thinking about water, oddly, more than about the abuse the film is ostensibly ‘about’, which says something about how completely Stewart has subordinated subject matter to form without losing sight of what it still costs the woman at the centre of it. That feels like the point Yuknavitch was making in the memoir, and Stewart has honoured it rather than flattened it into something safer. Very good. Not flawless, but very good, and worth your evening regardless.