Directed By Kristen Stewart

Starring – Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Jim Belushi

The Plot – Lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful Lidia Yuknavitch (Poots) accepts a college swimming scholarship in Texas in order to escape an abusive father and an alcoholic, suicidal mother. After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in the University of Oregon, where she is accepted by Ken Kesey (Belushi) to become one of thirteen graduate students who collaboratively write the novel Caverns with him. Drugs and alcohol continue to flow along with bisexual promiscuity and the discovery of S8M helps ease Lidia’s demons. Ultimately Lidia’s career as a writer and teacher combined with the love of her husband and son replace the earlier chaos that was her life

Rated R for adult language, nudity, drug use, and violence

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER Trailer | TIFF 2025

POSITIVES

Similar to her work as an Academy Award nominated actress, Stewart brings a distinctly experimental vision in her debut directorial effort that masterfully allows “The Chronology of Water” to transcend the conventionalism of contemporary formulaic biopics, instead opting for the authenticity and perspective that permeated in Yuknavitch’s gripping memoir, with a story that isn’t always easy to swallow. Simply put, this isn’t a film experience that will cater to all audiences equally, whether in the unapologetically graphic nature of Lidia’s documented trauma involving incestuous abuse or drugs, with sharply piercing sound designs and penetrating cinematography that boldly conveys the surveying of scattered and suppressed memorability, or the fragmented storytelling with the production’s spontaneous editing schemes, which doesn’t abide by the linear structure of three act storytelling. Being that Lidia is an accomplished swimmer, Stewart utilizes water as a unique framing device to which so many of these cunning aspects transpire with the fluidity and heaviness to life’s deepest adversity, eliciting an evocatively sensorial engagement that not only artistically immerses the audience in the vividness of Lidia’s bleakly sensitive memories, but also invokes a challenging undertow of pressure for our protagonist that atmospherically feels like it could pull her under at any given moment. Stewart firmly establishes a richly textured psychology for the character that easily allows for Lidia’s memories to materialize subconsciously, as a result of triggered environmental elements that bear a kinetic link to her foggy and unrelenting past, where so much of the sights, sounds, and even songs that she experiences in the foreground of the narrative render Lidia averted to a different time in the past, proving that what goes around definitely comes around, but typically in ways that render a profoundly versatile feeling to her now experienced outlook. Above all else, this allows the film to maintain the air of its boiling tension throughout a majority of its two hour runtime, keeping me wholeheartedly invested with speculative uncertainty, all the while crafting a jagged disposition to the stakes and circumstances of Lidia’s bleak outlook, which as a result of her irresponsible choices leave her reveling in fog of incoherence that allow days, months, and even years to transpire in the blink of the audience’s eyes. To a weaker film involving an outsider’s documenting, this would make the narrative feel disjointed or scatterbrained, especially how spontaneous the editing shifts between many arcs and supporting characters across a journey that spans more than thirty years, but Stewart never loses sight of the insightfully immersive door to Lidia’s tender history, establishing this singular perspective with the frazzled and frivolous clarity of a victimized woman, whose responses in the present serve a reminder of her haunting past, at times making this feel like a ghost story without any of the supernatural frights. Stewart also has a tremendous eye for detail, with regards to her overall presentation of the movie’s intentionally grainy canvas, featuring 16mm film and a 4:3 boxed-in aspect ratio that appraises a home movies kind of captivity to Lidia’s personalized accounting. From a stylistically entrancing element, the choices are simply breathtaking, inspiring a vintage texture that works wonderfully in the confines of the cloudily fuzzy traumas of the past, but atmospherically, they convey a raw and intimately imperfect feeling of growing dysphoria over Lidia’s emotional state, and considering Stewart and cinematographer Corey C. Waters (What a name for this film) choose these unordinary off-centered angles to convey Lidia at her most vulnerably perplexing, it never puts the audience at ease with what’s transpiring, channeling much of the same helplessness that we feel as children, whether with regards to Lidia’s traumatic captivity, or this air of ambiguity that continuously hangs over imagery before the script from Stewart pursues it. Last but not least, Stewart proves a knack for inspiring career-best performances among her ensemble, but particularly Imogen Poots and Jim Belushi, who each enable so much candid personality to their respective turns. For Poots, she’s tasked with the immense responsibility of communicating emotion with very little dialogue to internalize the anguish and intensity that overwhelm her, continuously stealing audience attention with rampant charisma and devastatingly darting eyes that burn a hole in her opposition, and Belushi, while relegated to more of the comedic dependency that he’s made a career out of, truly brings a genuineness and sincerity to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey, allowing him a few scenes of scene-stealing philosophy, in order to appraise meaning to what he represents as the light in the fog of Lidia’s futuristic outlook.

NEGATIVES

While Stewart undoubtedly has a knack for directing that will undoubtedly take the second act of her career many miles, she doesn’t show quite the same knowledge for screenwriting, a frequent hinderance that is especially realized in the pretentiousness of the movie’s dialogue intruding on a scene’s authentic integrity. Having not read Lidia’s memoir, it’s quite possible that Kristen borrowed some overly honest lines of dialogue from that literary companion, however they meander with the kind of punch-up tenacity that feels geared especially for movie trailers and marketing campaigns, particularly the mumbling narration from Poots, which on its own has incoherent word detectability problems in the sound mixing, which makes it difficult to not only follow along, but even worse conjures these out of nowhere lines like “I’m not talking out of my asshole”, that compromise the durability of a scene’s tonal consistency, making it difficult to keep from laughing at lines so obnoxiously full of themself for quieter moments that deserve interpretation on the audience’s terms. The narration itself is a nice tool to convey insight into some of Lidia’s most questionable actions, but I do feel like the script reaches for it a bit too often in illustrating an intention, taking away the influence and capability out of the performances in ways that threaten their influence over the movie’s appeal. Aside from this, the movie feels far too long, even at two hours, especially in the confines of a five chapter structure where the later acts vehemently overstay their welcome. There’s certainly an imbalance factor among some scenes, where certain moments are given far too much screen time, while others (Particularly the abuse of Lidia’s sister) doesn’t receive enough, but I can forgive that in a film that is focused entirely from Lidia’s perspective. What I can’t forgive is a film that has a satisfying resolution, around the movie’s 100 minute mark, but carries on for another twenty minutes, where the aforementioned sulking dialogue and tethering of the pacing starts to set in, leaving us with an abruptly inferior resolution that omits with it some of the meaningful momentum attained from Lidia’s most therapeutically alleviating moment.

OVERALL
“The Chronology of Water” is an artistically enamoring directorial debut for Kristen Stewart, whose scratchily sensorial spectrum sifts through the depths of one woman’s suppressed traumas with the flow and heaviness of a rapidly approaching high tide. While the scattered storytelling and meandering dialogue pulls the movie’s momentum into a bit of an undertow during its defining third act, the career-defining turn from Imogen Poots settles it back on shore, committing herself to a bravely bold and intensely anguishing performance that she dives head first into

My Grade: 7.0 or C+