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The Chronology of Water opens in silence, darkness, then extending sounds and visuals. There’s an immediacy that mimics how memory and PTSD really work: image flashes, sound clips, a flit from one moment to another then a lingering. A girl dives into water; a woman crawls on reddening shower tiles; water; blood. Hands. Eyes. Blink.
Like its namesake 2011 memoir by Portland writer Lidia Yuknavitch, Water opens with a stillbirth, or the memory of it, then shifts back in time to an abusive, staggering childhood. A competitive swimmer throughout her youth, Lidia (Imogen Poots) finally has a way to escape her sexually abusive father when a university in Texas offers her a scholarship—which the Olympic hopeful soon loses due to substance abuse. She spends the proceeding years exploring and claiming her sexuality, battling her addictions, wading through toxic relationships and, finally, discovering writing and its transformative powers.
Water premieres Dec. 5 in New York and Los Angeles (Portland’s hometown sneak peek was in October for the Portland Film Festival), and though it won’t be released widely until the new year, the time to get hyped for Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is now. There’s still plenty of time to read (or reread) the engrossing source material before opening night.
Despite its fragmented composition, Water in some ways follows a fairly classic memoir structure; it brings us into one of the most impactful traumas of a person’s life then takes us back in time, helps us understand all that came before that moment so when it arrives later in full scene, the impact is all the greater. And much like its namesake, the film trusts the intelligence of its viewers as we piece together references and gather the storyline.
Stewart, who founded the women-led production company Nevermind Pictures in 2023 together with screenwriter-director Dylan Meyer and producer Maggie McLean, was determined for Water to be her first film for that very reason: She wanted to offer the pieces of Yuknavitch’s narrative and push the viewer to assemble the story for themselves. The result is a visually and sonically fascinating experience that doesn’t sit still. We go from Lidia’s tumultuous childhood home in Florida to her college experience in Texas, where she meets new drugs and explores new lovers.
Watching Yuknavitch’s memoir come to life on screen was an electric experience. Throughout the harrowing and empowering film I felt grateful and safe under the directorial reins of a woman: how it portrays glimpses and aftermaths of a girl’s abuse and a man’s rage from the woman’s perspective. How we see the ways in which memory lives in a body, how experiences show up in staggering flashes. There are moments in which Lidia is writing something and she hears her father say something; sometimes a phrase, sometimes even just a word. Those moments are well rendered and authentic and never too heavy-handed. Visually, we see just enough to get enraged, and to understand what comes later, the path our narrator takes.
Poots narrates memoir passages throughout the film, adding context to moments to come onscreen. Soon, a narrative is emerging: Lidia moving through her teenage years and into her 20s where she bashes onto the literary scene with a force.
A core narrative of this story is a person not just finding her voice as a writer, but discovering its transformational healing powers. While I love a good story whose center is “How I Became the Writer I Am,” it’s easy to create eye-rolling clichés and privileges built into that narrative. In book form, Water is one of the least cliché books I’ve ever read—and one I frequently teach in classes. In film, Stewart has managed to capture that essence. Shot on 16 mm, scenes in which Lidia is figuring out how and what to write are woven throughout the story and extend as she grows into herself as a woman, a writer, a teacher.
There’s a great series of scenes in which Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) mentors Lidia at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It is through Kesey’s group novel writing cohort that Lidia truly starts to see what’s possible with her writing. “You can write, girl,” Kesey says at the end of one drunken scene.
In a later scene, after Lidia has gotten some literary attention and is teaching writing classes of her own, she says to her students, “People say to me all the time: Do the things in your short stories actually happen?” She looks around the room at their enraptured faces. We get quick cuts to her walking out of class. Back to class. Out of class. “Isn’t that the question? When it comes to life? Did this really happen to me?” Back to class. Out of class. “I don’t know. The things that happened to us are true. But writing is a whole other body.”
As Stewart has said in interviews, writing is “an act of radical power.” Water demonstrates just how powerful and freeing that act can be and the difficult journey many writers have to take in order to figure out how to write their story. If I had to write a one-sentence review of The Chronology of Water it’d go something like: raw, empowering and just really damn good; this might be the best film adaptation I’ve ever seen and is a perfect example of why we need more women directing.
