{"id":301368,"date":"2025-12-06T01:13:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T01:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/301368\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T01:13:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T01:13:09","slug":"the-chronology-of-water-review-kristen-stewarts-trauma-slurry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/301368\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chronology Of Water review: Kristen Stewart’s trauma slurry"},"content":{"rendered":"

A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source, The Chronology Of Water sees Kristen Stewart liquify Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s memoir into a expressionistic slurry. In her feature debut as writer-director, Stewart takes explicit pains to explicitly render Yuknavitch\u2019s pain on screen, drenching the swimmer-turned-writer\u2019s life\u2014spanning childhood abuse, young-adult hedonism, and professional success\u2014in over-styled and overindulgent imagery. Despite its relative formal boldness, The Chronology Of Water is as ineffectively elliptical and muttery as Stewart\u2019s first short film, the similarly aquatic \u201cCome Swim.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

In a shorter or more complex character study, that opaque aesthetic approach could bring the audience into its subject\u2019s world, or translate a chaotic headful of emotions and coping mechanisms into a blast of elemental feeling. But The Chronology Of Water is two hours of simplistic, one-to-one, cause-and-effect personal history, disguised by its shifting shape. For each adolescent horror experienced by Lidia (Imogen Poots)\u2014mostly at the hands of her sexually abusive father (Michael Epp)\u2014there is a direct corollary to come later in her life. Even though Stewart\u2019s film is more focused on evoking sensation than making sense, miring Lidia\u2019s life in the various liquids of blood, piss, cum, and water (the latter from swimming pools, choppy seas, and tear ducts) never clarifies the woman underneath all the muck.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to glean the broad strokes. Lidia finds an escape route away from her predatory dad and alcoholic mom in swimming, which earns her an athletic scholarship to a school out of town and sparks her bisexual awakening in a quiet corner of the locker room. Once at college, Lidia\u2019s painful early life manifests in rebellion\u2014Stewart relays this, as she relays almost everything in the film, through fractured quick cuts of warm-hued close-ups. These relentless, repetitive, interchangeable sequences of pain, sex, and substance abuse border on masturbatory even when Lidia isn\u2019t literally rubbing one out. As the film nears her career as an author, and continues quoting at length from Yuknavitch\u2019s prose (when it\u2019s not listening to Poots recite passages at readings), its reverence for its source becomes hard to ignore.<\/p>\n

The literary voiceover from Poots, mumbled and under-mixed, evokes some of Stewart\u2019s most mannered performances, like her skittish oddball in Crimes Of The Future<\/a>. But that\u2019s not Lidia. Lidia is straightforward and blunt and intense, Poots\u2019 glare as steady as her gait is wobbly. She harangues and lashes out, pushing her romantic partners around just as she was pushed around. It\u2019s all as basic and blunt as the film\u2019s juxtaposition of her being spanked as a child and her future dalliance with BDSM. Lidia\u2019s anger tries to guide The Chronology Of Water through its stupor, though this only breaks up the abstract haze with moments of too-stiff clarity, like a bleary-eyed boozer trying to oversell their sobriety when questioned.<\/p>\n

These more straightforward sections ramp up around the film\u2019s midpoint, when Lidia makes her way to the University of Oregon as a member of a writing class led by Ken Kesey (a goofily fried Jim Belushi), contributing to the collaborative novel Caverns. But Kesey\u2019s pluckish debauchery never quite proves a counterpoint to the self-destruction clouding Lidia\u2019s burgeoning abilities as a writer. Similarly, Poots\u2019 subtle wariness around him, emphasized by the camera\u2019s shifting glance, is overrun by his recognizability\u2014industry namedropping and diegetic admiration take precedence over more uncomfortable personal complexities. Despite this and other intimate connections (like a few love affairs with passive men and bold women), Stewart\u2019s film blurs its subject, showing how, at such zoomed-in extremes, a close-up is as impersonal as a body observed at a distance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an initially striking effect, but its impact is shallow. After a few hours of this familiar fragmented suffering, never adding up to anything as punishingly breathless as If I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You<\/a> or as personality-driven as Sorry, Baby<\/a>, The Chronology Of Water is simply wearying. As Lidia hurtles forward on the warpath with impending normalcy, there\u2019s little lasting sense of the harrowing trials she\u2019s survived or the provocative ways in which she\u2019s shared them with readers. Stewart applies an admirably experimental vision to her adaptation, but she can\u2019t translate whatever power she may have found in Yuknavitch\u2019s text to the screen.<\/p>\n

Director: Kristen Stewart
Writers: Kristen Stewart
Starring: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Susannah Flood, Tom Sturridge, Kim Gordon, Michael Epp, Earl Cave, Esm\u00e9 Creed-Miles, Jim Belushi
Release Date: December 5, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-301368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}