THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER – Review by Leslie Combemale
Of course memory is subjective. It lies to us. It reorders story. It plays like a damaged 8-millimeter film in our heads. Memory also isn’t always kind. Regardless of how we WANT to remember, it plays sharp, shocking snippets of experience, often unbidden, anytime of the day or night. For those who have trauma in their personal history, it can be a destructive, obtrusive loop that only stops with hard work or hard drinking. This is the genesis of Lidia Yuknavitch’s incendiary memoir The Chronology of Water, which draws from her survival of physical and sexual abuse by her father, drug addiction, the power of memory, and the experience of womanhood.
When Kristen Stewart read the book, she was so struck by its power that she determined it would be her first feature film. It took her eight years of creative effort and financial struggle to bring it to the screen, before it finally premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The result is a lyrical, intense but languid examination of memory and resilience. It’s as though Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, and Terrence Malick had a cinematic baby, birthing it through a decidedly feminist lens. In case you don’t know those references, let me make it easy for you. There are lots of blunt mentions of incest, copious drug use, and more masturbation in this film than probably any other you’ve ever seen, with female shame and rebellion explored in equal measure. It’s the film equivalent of picking a scab and watching it bleed over and over again.
Lidia’s perspective is very fragmented, often angry, self-abusive, and transgressive, and The Chronology of Water captures that in both an honest and fearless way. The film follows, in non-linear fashion, the life of Lidia Yuknavitch, who grew up in a household with a sexually and physically abusive father and apathetic alcoholic mother. She escaped by gaining a swimming scholarship, then drank, drugged and sexed her way through school. After losing her baby in childbirth, she became a seeker, plumbing the depths of her own darkness and finding redemption through writing. Imogen Poots is at her career best in the lead role, bringing naturalistic life to Lidia’s rage and embodying it, then showing her moments of catharsis and expansion with believability and depth. Jim Belushi makes a wonderful Ken Kesey, the real-life iconoclastic writer/professor who mentored Lidia on her journey as a confessionalist author.
Those who know the work of Terrence Malick will either feel excitement or trepidation knowing he was one of Stewart’s inspirations in making the film. Is her directorial debut ponderous navel-gazing, or a considered, meditative examination of memory and emotion from a uniquely feminist perspective? Possibly, it’s both. Certainly her avant-garde approach as auteur and Imogen Poots in the role represent fearless filmmaking and performance. In a film world glutted with male-centric superhero and race car blockbusters, that can only be a good thing.
4 out of 5 stars.
