This film is not designed for comfortable viewing. It is uneven, risky, and sometimes overwrought. It is also courageous, deeply felt, and astonishingly personal

Title: The Chronology of Water
Director: Kristen Stewart
Cast: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Susannah Flood, Tom Sturridge
Where: In theatres near you
Rating: 3.5 Stars

This film, Kristen Stewart’s first feature, arrives with the force of a memory crashing through a calm mind. It is not the kind of film that gently ushers you in; it dunks you headfirst into its protagonist’s inner world, a swirling storm of recollection, rebellion, and ruin. Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, the film resists the safety of linear storytelling and instead fashions itself as a mosaic of feeling. The result is bracing, often beautiful, sometimes exhausting.

Stewart pursues emotional truth rather than tidy exposition. What unfolds is less a biography and more a fever dream of survival, stitched from images that bleed into each other with quiet menace. The film revels in sensory overload, occasionally testing the viewer’s patience, but that very relentlessness is its thesis: trauma is not a sequence of events; it is an experience that loops, interrupts and intrudes without permission.

Though unapologetically experimental, the film’s intent is earnest. Stewart aims to honour Yuknavitch’s radical candour by avoiding the polite grammar of traditional cinema. There are moments when the film feels overworked, its metaphors too eager to impress, yet even these excesses are born of sincerity. This is a director trying not only to adapt a story but to inhabit its psychological architecture.

Actors’ Performance

Imogen Poots delivers a performance of astonishing transparency. She captures the contradictions of Yuknavitch with rare precision: the defiance that masks fragility, the recklessness that cohabits with longing, and the strange tenderness that emerges even in the midst of self-destruction. Her embodiment is not polished; it is lived-in, scraped, and startlingly vulnerable.

The supporting cast enriches the portrait with textured performances. Thora Birch brings a quiet, quivering sorrow to the older sister, Claudia, who escaped early but carries the bruise of abandonment. Jim Belushi, in a gentle and unexpectedly layered turn, embodies Ken Kesey as both eccentric mentor and unlikely emotional ballast. Earl Cave’s portrayal of a kind-hearted partner adds warmth, while Michael Epp’s chilling restraint as the father creates an oppressive shadow that lingers long after his scenes end.

Even the briefest appearances, such as Kim Gordon’s enigmatic photographer or Susannah Flood’s emotionally detached mother, leave impactful impressions.

Music and Aesthetics

Shot on grainy 16mm, the film appears like memory left too long in sunlight, faded at the edges, vivid at its core. Stewart relies heavily on visual collage, letting jump cuts, colour washes and intrusive light do the psychological heavy lifting. At times, it borders on sensory overload, yet this very excess creates an emotional texture that lingers.

The soundscape is discordant, rhythmic, and always slightly unsettling. It acts like a second narrator. Audiences familiar with mainstream cinema’s tendency toward melodic reassurance may find the score’s jagged edges alienating, but here dissonance is the point. The aesthetics reflect the book’s spirit: fragmented, fluid, and aware that healing rarely looks polished.

FPJ Verdict

This film is not designed for comfortable viewing. It is uneven, risky, and sometimes overwrought. It is also courageous, deeply felt, and astonishingly personal. The film undeniably marks the arrival of a filmmaker unafraid of discomfort or complexity. Overall, the film rewards with a singular, unsettling, and ultimately hopeful meditation on survival.