One of the first shots in The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, is a close-up of blood flowing into a shower drain, after Lidia (Imogen Poots) suffers a miscarriage. It’s not the first time that Lidia’s body has betrayed her, and it won’t be the last, but it may be the betrayal that cuts the deepest.

Lidia doesn’t scream when she’s eventually forced to pass her stillborn child out of her. She simply and quietly latches onto the detail that despite the rest of her child’s body being corpse blue, her lips were still pink. It’s a heartbreaking moment that Stewart tellingly lingers on. Where Poots largely portrays Lidia as a frayed, electric nerve for most of the film, in this moment she’s a woman utterly hollowed out by the quiet horror of it all.

Stewart’s choice of a wide shot to capture Lidia’s entire face stands in stark contrast to the uncomfortable close-ups and odd focal points that define the rest of the film. Lidia may not scream, but Stewart directs the scene with a fury that presents every unassuming scrap of the woman’s memory as the scene of a crime. Which, to be fair, much of it was for Yuknavitch.

Like the memoir it’s based on, Stewart’s film takes its title seriously. If a woman’s life is a body of still water running deep, the toxic matter that drops into Lidia’s life is years of childhood emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of her father (Michael Epp). The general beats of Lidia’s story feel familiar, which is its own kind of crime, what with accounts of abuse and assault being so terrifyingly ubiquitous that they almost feel mundane. And the beauty of Stewart’s focus is how she excavates the profound from the mundane.

Stewart fixates on the corners of rooms, the patterns of people’s skin, the wrinkles on faces, and more, with the stream-of-consciousness editing making some masterful connections between the tiny details of every touchstone moment in Lidia’s life. All of Lidia’s anger, grief, and hate stemming from her trauma intensifies over the course of her life, and the thrust of the story is in the desperate attempt to calm the waters, or at least find the courage to signal to someone that she’s drowning without taking someone into the depths with her.

It’s a decades-long process that has its collateral damage, on everything from property to relationships. Lidia’s body is a Judas throughout her life, and above all of Stewart’s other fixations across her hauntingly fragmentary film is a near-Cronenbergian fascination and revulsion with the female form. Lidia’s body is an effigy that she’s willing to stab, slash, throw against objects and people, and every once in a while even respect and love in lurid detail.

Poots, for her part, channels a vast, dark rainbow of destructive emotions, making it so the steadily increasing moments of peace, connection, joy, and acceptance, all hard won, that come later feel all the more earned and cathartic. Both the ugliest and most sublime, beautiful moments of Lidia’s soul are captured in razor-sharp shards by Stewart, making this less a feature-length directorial debut than a violently explosive breach into a new aspect of her craft.

Score: 

 Cast: Imogen Poots, Michael Epp, Susannah Flood, Thora Birch, Tom Sturridge, Earl Cave, Esmé Creed-Miles, Kim Gordon, Jim Belushi  Director: Kristen Stewart  Screenwriter: Kristen Stewart  Distributor: The Forge  Running Time: 128 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2025
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