The Chronology of Water (2025)

A young woman escapes her abusive childhood, experiments with drugs, alcohol and sex, and dares to write about it, finding her voice.

Memory, trauma, and pain in cinematic fragments. The Chronology of Water begins and ends as it intends to continue: with an artistic dissection of memory and its inherent fragmentation. What we remember – and more importantly, how we remember it – becomes the film’s central preoccupation. Co-writer/director Kristen Stewart (directorial debut) advances the narrative in a deliberately non-chronological fashion, crafting a cinematic language that mirrors the instability of youth and trauma.

Through asynchronous editing, rapid-fire cuts, restless camera movement, invasive close-ups, and carefully deployed match-cuts that bridge parallel timelines, the film constructs a sensory experience rather than a conventional narrative. Sound design plays an equally crucial role: intrusive noises, often seemingly out of place, function as psychological ruptures that expose the disturbance beneath the surface. Special credit is due to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm, whose rhythmic precision holds together what could easily have collapsed into pure chaos.

This is filmmaking that consciously positions itself outside mainstream comfort. Confusion, disorientation, and unease are objective, not side effects. Reality and its distorted recollection blur until the film resembles a cinematic diary, a subjective excavation of a life marked by trauma, resilience, and uneasy triumph.

Imogen Poots delivers what can only be described as an awards-calibre performance, embodying writer Lidia Yuknavitch with raw, often painful vulnerability. Her portrayal captures the film’s central question: Is artistic brilliance innate, or is it carved out of suffering?

Stewart, Yuknavitch, Poots, and Neergaard-Holm push experimentation to its limits across the film’s substantial runtime (over two hours). The result is a work where moments of beauty are constantly shadowed by emotional darkness, where sweetness only registers because of the bitterness that precedes it.

This is essential viewing for cinephiles and lovers of arthouse and intellectual montage traditions. Wider audiences may find the experience… demanding – and the film has already struggled to secure broad commercial footing, despite the ultimate support from producer Ridley Scott.

Challenging, abrasive, and formally daring, The Chronology of Water is less a film you watch and more one you endure, and, for the right audience, deeply admire.