Discover how Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, transforms Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir into a visceral, emotional cinematic experience. Explore its themes of trauma, memory, sexuality, and rebirth in this in-depth review.
Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water”: A Radical, Sensory Dive Into Trauma, Memory, and Rebirth
Most films tell us what happened. Only a few dare to show us what it felt like while it was happening. That difference is everything, and it’s the key to understanding the shockwave created by Kristen Stewart’s feature-length directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water.”
Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s acclaimed 2011 memoir, the film plunges directly into the raw, electric sensations of memory, trauma, and transformation. Stewart doesn’t simply adapt Yuknavitch’s work — she channels it. She understands its emotional ferocity, its experimental pulse, and the cultural edge the author has always embraced. Working alongside Imogen Poots, who delivers a stunning performance as Lidia, Stewart shapes a film that feels less like a biopic and more like being swept through someone else’s nervous system.
A Life Marked by Pain, Desire, and Survival
Yuknavitch’s upbringing was a minefield. She grew up in San Francisco, trapped with an abusive father and a mother numbed by alcoholism. Her older sister escaped as soon as she could; Lidia survived by losing herself in competitive swimming. For a time, the pool was a refuge — even a ticket to college on a scholarship — but unprocessed trauma has gravity, and it pulled her toward drugs, chaotic relationships, and self-destruction.
Her memoir famously recounts these years with brutal honesty. She once wrote that the decade she most wanted to die was the decade she chased danger, sex, drugs, and the numbness of constant motion, all while carrying the unhealed wound of childhood abuse. That decade also included the devastating loss of her newborn daughter — a trauma Stewart confronts head-on in the film.
Memory Is Not Linear — And Stewart Doesn’t Pretend It Is
The movie opens with Lidia giving birth to a stillborn baby girl. The aftermath unfolds in a shower streaked with blood, the tiles leaving marks on her knees. The image is fragmented, the way real trauma replays in the mind — not as a clean scene but as flashes of color, flesh, and unbearable detail.
Shot on 16mm film, the entire movie has the hazy, flickering quality of an intrusive memory. Cinematographer Corey C. Waters leans into a style that feels almost improvisational. Scenes seem to start in the middle of a moment, giving the impression that viewers have stumbled into Lidia’s recollections rather than watching staged reenactments. It’s deeply intimate and often disarming.
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Even with all the pain in Lidia’s past, the film makes room for the power of pleasure. Some of the sexual encounters in her adult life are depicted as liberating and joyous — a reclamation of something that was taken from her too young. It’s rare to see sexuality portrayed with such nuance in a trauma narrative, and it’s one of the film’s quiet triumphs.
A Brilliant Cast That Grounds the Chaos
Stewart’s casting choices are inspired.
- Imogen Poots is magnetic as Lidia, fierce and broken and tender all at once.
- Thora Birch brings heartbreaking depth to the role of Lidia’s sister.
- Kim Gordon appears as a photographer-dominatrix whose presence becomes part of Lidia’s healing.
- Michael Epp plays the father with chilling restraint — glimpsed in fragments, heard in sharp sounds like the click of a lighter that feels designed to trigger.
But the biggest surprise is Jim Belushi as novelist Ken Kesey.
Ken Kesey and the Turning Point That Changed Everything
In the late ’80s, Yuknavitch studied at the University of Oregon, where Ken Kesey invited her into a communal writing project. Stewart doesn’t treat Kesey as a cameo; she treats him as a pivot point. With a red beret and a mischievous, weathered presence, Belushi channels the Merry Prankster in his final era. He’s rough, brilliant, blunt, and oddly tender.
Kesey sees Lidia. He recognizes her talent, her fire, her affinity with water. When he calls her a mermaid, it’s half joke, half revelation. His simple, slurred declaration — “You can WRITE, girl!” — becomes a spark powerful enough to cut through years of darkness. Poots’ reaction to this moment is quietly devastating.
Not a Neat “Empowerment Story” — Something Wilder
Labeling Yuknavitch’s story as a tale of empowerment is too simple. Her work — like that of the late Kathy Acker, another literary icon who embraced the taboo — challenges, provokes, and refuses easy moral framing. Yuknavitch once said she wanted to “plant little bombs” in the memoir space, and Stewart honors that spirit. She doesn’t sanitize anything, nor does she sensationalize it. She lets it breathe in all its ferocity.
Stewart Was Made for This Material
Before this feature, Stewart directed a 17-minute short, “Come Swim,” drenched in aquatic imagery and emotional fragmentation — almost a rehearsal for the cinematic language she uses here. It feels as though Yuknavitch’s work helped Stewart access something already inside her: a visual world where the subconscious rules, where memory and emotion override narrative order.
A Story About Making a Story You Can Live With
At its core, “The Chronology of Water” is about finding a way to survive what should have killed you — and then shaping that survival into something meaningful. Yuknavitch once said, “Memories are stories. So you’d better come up with one you can live with.”
Stewart’s film honors that challenge with fearless artistry. It doesn’t just tell Lidia Yuknavitch’s story — it immerses us in how it felt to live it.
