{"id":290711,"date":"2026-02-10T15:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T15:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/290711\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T15:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T15:33:09","slug":"the-chronology-of-water-review-an-uncompromising-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/290711\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chronology Of Water review \u2014 ‘an uncompromising debut’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gifted swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch (Imogen Poots) grows up in an abusive household, and later finds herself through writing.<\/p>\n

The Chronology\u00a0Of\u00a0Water<\/a> has been a long time coming. Kristen Stewart announced her plans to make her directorial debut as far as back as 2018. By 2022, the actor admitted that she would \u201cdie\u201d if she\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0make the film. The years of\u00a0hard work\u00a0behind her adaptation of Lidia\u00a0Yuknavitch\u2019s\u00a0titular memoir can be felt in every single frame \u2014 covered, quite literally, in blood, sweat and tears.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

If it were possible to crack open\u00a0Yuknavitch\u2019s\u00a0brain and project all the thoughts and messy feelings inside, The Chronology\u00a0Of\u00a0Water is what it might look like: fragmented and divorced from linear time.\u00a0There\u2019s\u00a0a story that eventually takes shape, though Stewart\u2019s bold avoidance of traditional narrative structure makes it tricky to parse at first. An exhilarating Imogen Poots plays Lidia throughout her life, from a teenage competitive swimmer tormented by her abusive father, through to adulthood, when writing becomes her salvation from addiction,\u00a0grief\u00a0and lifelong pain.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0not so much the course of events that make Lidia\u2019s memories perennially stick in her mind, but the sensory experience: the cacophonic sounds of a swimming pool, the smell of sex, the aching sensations on her skin.<\/p>\n

Give credit where\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0due to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm, who pieces together the film\u2019s rapid succession of intense close-ups and context-free vignettes into a memory poem that makes sense of the chaos. Cuts between the past and present detail how moments in Lidia\u2019s life seem to rhyme with one another. In one scene, an invitation to perform a live reading of her writing conjures up memories of the letters\u00a0regarding\u00a0the college scholarships she\u00a0failed to\u00a0acquire\u00a0after high school. Trauma acts like a hidden thorn waiting to puncture Lidia\u2019s joy at a moment\u2019s notice. The unorthodox editing also dismantles the reliability of the film\u2019s narrator. Was an argument between Lidia and her first boyfriend laced with humour or malice? She remembers both.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0not so much the course of events that make Lidia\u2019s memories perennially stick in her mind, but the sensory experience: the cacophonic sounds of a swimming pool, the smell of sex, the aching sensations on her skin. Shooting on 16mm film, Stewart displays a sharp\u00a0eye for colour and texture. Lidia\u2019s hazy recollections begin with blood pooling on a bathroom floor, and the criss-cross pattern of the tile branded on her knee.<\/p>\n

After conquering the arthouse with the likes of Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women<\/a>), Olivier Assayas (Clouds Of Sils Marina<\/a>), Pablo Larra\u00edn (Spencer<\/a>), and David Cronenberg (Crimes Of The Future<\/a>), Stewart was never going to be a traditional filmmaker. And as disorientating as it may be, her first outing is an expansive, lyrical tapestry, in which she bravely leaves the viewer to make sense of its aquatic imagery. As a director, you can either\u00a0sink or swim, and Stewart readily takes to these waters.<\/p>\n

An uncompromising debut that weaves Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s rich but troubled life into hypnotic poetry. Kristen Stewart reintroduces herself as an exciting filmmaker who\u2019s out to make a splash<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gifted swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch (Imogen Poots) grows up in an abusive household, and later finds herself through writing.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-290711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}