The Chronology of Water 2025

“The Chronology of Water,” the first film directed by Kristen Stewart, isn’t some serviceable, prosaic, actor-directs-actors-how-to-read-the-script thing. It’s far more artful and captivating than that. It’s based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who told the story of how she grew up in a sexually abusive household, and how she attempted to squirm away from the legacy of it — through competitive swimming, through sex and drugs and anger and other escape hatches, and ultimately through becoming a writer in the mode of Charles Bukowski. Yet for a long time her escapes didn’t work. She was too imprinted with the sickness that had been visited upon her.  All of this is incredibly internal. It’s the sort of thing I’ve seen a hundred filmmakers try to dramatize, and what you tend to get is good intentions, a lot of piety about abusive households, and maybe a workable shadow of the consciousness the film is out to capture. 

 Kristen Stewart shoots past all that. As a writer-director, she’s working on the high wire — making a movie that’s all about consciousness, one that shows you everything but never spells it out too obviously.  

- Owen Gleiberman, Variety