So Kristen Stewart made a movie and, in spite of what the goons hoped, didn’t fall flat on her face. The Chronology of Water will infuriate people who harbour a grudge. Though, on the other hand, surely the twittersphere (Xsphere?) can’t still be hating on Stewart? After all this time? For the RPatz stuff? Or the sulky features and mumbling performances. Or suddenly becoming the highest paid actress in the world – briefly, till she walked away from all that.
Who knows? There’s an irrational hellbeast out there for all of us if we look hard enough. Personally, I’m a fan, of Stewart’s “fuck you” attitude but particularly of the sort of films she started making since departing the world of boy-wolves and hot vampires. Take Clouds of Sils Maria, as complex a piece of acting as you’ll ever see, pulled off with seeming ease by Stewart and co-star Juliette Binoche. Or Personal Shopper for more of the same.
She is in the same register here, relying on Imogen Poots to bring home the acting goods in this adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about growing up in an abusive family and seeking escape, first as a competitive swimmer and later using sex and drugs to blot out the pain.
Stewart shoots it in a non-narrative, semi-poetic way, dropping into and out of Lidia’s life at various points – now she’s being raped by her dad, now she’s discovering drugs, now she’s at college meeting a sweet guy (Earl Cave) whose life she ruins, now she’s giving birth to a stillborn child. This non-chronological, impressionistic way of building a narrative smacks of needless artiness if done badly. But Stewart does it well, and Poots rises to the occasion with a lovely performance running through all the emotions and mental states – zonked to hysterical, joyous to furious, orgasms and tears. It’s a much more demanding role than, say, Jessie Buckley’s in Hamnet. So where are Poots’s awards? Strange and irrational at the best of times, the vagaries of acting awards are a mystery unto themselves.
Eventually Lidia winds up on a writing course taught by the ageing, charismatic Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi, inspired casting and a superb performance) and Stewart gives us a sniff of redemption while at the same time bringing the movie into the harbour towards which it’s spiritually been heading. This, at bottom, is a Beat movie, in the tradition of Kerouac and Kesey, wild and adventurous, in search of freedom – though from what, exactly, is always the question. Yuknavitch, born in 1963, is from the right generation to venerate that old guard of hipsters. Stewart, born in 1990, has always hankered after all that – her public persona is half borrowed from Lennon and Dylan – most obviously in Walter Salles’s adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road (a mixed bag, in spite of her performance).
Maybe it’s also a coded semi-autobiography of Stewart herself, how growing up in showbiz is akin to abuse, and how the safety valves of sex and drugs only offer temporary relief. Poots’s mumblecore acting style might nudge you in that direction too.
Blood, vomit, vaginal juices, the “snot equals reality” mathematics are definitely in play here, but overall this is a 1970s movie in look and tone – flare in the lens, a stoner vibe, a looseness to the structure – which avoids some of the screenwriting strictures about character arcs and so on yet also, once it’s done, has clearly followed them all, just in disguise.
So, yes, Kristen Stewart has made a movie, and made a decent one out of a misery memoir, a challenge in itself. And an intelligent one with a tension at its core, about the power of stories and the stupidity of believing that stories equate somehow to real life. Writing as redemptive, Stewart and Yuknavitch and Poots all seem to be saying, you’d have to be an idiot to buy too fully into all that.
The Chronology of Water – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
