Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s acclaimed memoir, actress Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water is a laceratingly intimate portrait of the aftershocks of abuse and addiction, told from an unapologetically female perspective.
There’s something to be said for superstars who squeeze nourishing juice from the lemons of success instead of leaving them in their gilded bowls to rot. After becoming a household name in the wake of her leading role in the Twilight franchise, actress Kristen Stewart could easily have rested on her laurels and accepted any number of low-hanging fruit that came her way. Instead, she leaned into her cineaste inclinations and opted to at least juggle mainstream work with deeper and knottier projects – from the complex and layered exploration of ageing-and-art-making of Oliver Assays’s Clouds of Sils Maria to the more recent and far pulpier sapphic crime-caper Love Lies Bleeding.
And now, Stewart takes a turn behind the camera with The Chronology of Water, based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s acclaimed memoir of the same name and partly filmed in Malta last summer, on locations such as the National Swimming Pool Complex, Villa Bighi, Dawret Il-Qawra and San Anton Gardens.
She has opted for a project that would likely not have been made at this scale without someone of her ilk providing backing, at the very least. But as she serves as screenwriter, director and co-producer here, it’s more than just mere backing we’re looking at, but the work of a debut filmmaker endowed with the best possible features that you’d hope from such a role: an urgent need to deliver a story that comes from a place of raw personal truth, in a style that is fully committed and free of cynicism and cheap tricks.
While calling the film ‘non-linear’ may not be entirely correct – the overarching story proceeds through clearly demarcated ‘chapters’ that broadly speaking, move chronologically – irruptions of the past into the present are a constant feature of the micro level. This is evident from the opening scenes, where Lidia (Imogen Poots) lies hunched over in the bath, bleeding in the wake of a miscarriage, comforted her sister Claudia (Thora Birch)… a scene that, in turn, recalls when Lidia was embracing her mother (Susannah Flood) in much the same way a few decades back.
This establishes a covenant of women whose psyches will be informed by the after-effects of an abusive patriarch (Michael Epp), but it is primarily Lidia’s story that we will be following – a painted and twisting coming-of-age tale that begins with her equating the abuse with the awakening of sexual desire. Olympic swimming is the only thing that gives Lidia a form of respite, and even the promise of academic advancement. But any success – both personal or professional – is at the risk of coming undone by her persistent self-destructive streak.
In lesser hands the overall framework could easily have been re-tooled to suit the staid format of the biopic: challenging beginnings leading to a rise in fortune and a subsequent plummet, before a resolution of some kind is worked out. But together with her co-writer Andy Mingo, Stewart makes sure our focus is far away from any narrative tropes and instead, on how these earthquakes are reflected in Lidia’s body.
In many ways, the film invites us to be trapped inside this body for a while – and this kind of dedicated focus on the female experience is rare enough, let alone as shot through by such a fearlessly vulnerable performance as what we get from Imogen Poots.
Matching the equally lacerating and revelatory contours of the source material, Lidia is presented to us as an unvarnished wreck, and we stay with her even as she scorches the earth on which she nominally stands. Here’s a career-making performance from an actress that has already shown great taste and range; and this takes an equally strong director. Jim Belushi’s turn as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey also deserves a mention here. Kesey has a crucial hand in shepherding the redemptive phase of Lidia’s life after she manages to get into his creative writing workshop and he turns out to be precisely the kind of mentor that she needs: by turns ogre and bear, drunken, drug-addled, wise and hilarious… already a relic of the latter half of the Beat generation in the nineties, let alone now. This may feel like stunt casting at first glance, but Stewart coaxes a marvellously lived-in performance from everyone’s favourite retro-schlub that is entirely of a piece with this knotted and vulnerable gut-punch of a film.
It is entirely possible to make good cinema in the age of franchises and AI. What we need is fresh, urgent voices telling equally essential stories. If the likes of Stewart can still find a way to thrive in this system, maybe a sliver of hope exists for those of us hungry to slip out of the status quo and come up for air.
This review is based on a screening of The Chronology of Water at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025
