The Chronology of Water: Kristen Stewart walks on water (review)
The story of a woman reconstructing through literature a life ravaged by incest, portrayed by Imogen Poots, once again masterful. A radical and fascinating first feature.
It is a project that Kristen Stewart took years to hatch. Time first to digest the shock felt while reading Fluid Mechanics, the memoirs of Lidia Yuknavitch who recounted a youth shattered by a family world of rare toxicity, between an alcoholic mother and a father who abused her then her reconstruction step by step, through literature. Time, then, to think about how to take hold of this life to transform it into a feature-length fiction film and to find the financing to follow the path she has chosen, anything but consensual, by digging into the flaws instead of rounding off the angles.
The result impresses with this radicality. The Chronology of Water is one of those films that we feel physically, in the skin of this suffering character, a thousand miles from any psychologization. There is nothing discreet about its staging, it voluntarily invades the screen in a visual artist’s gesture which constantly plays on colors, material and sound where the physical relationships are organic and devoid of any eroticism.
She creates a film which never seeks to seduce but to transmit the most unpleasant, most unbearable sensations. Those that incest causes: self-loathing, the desire to disappear into the sound and fury. In each shot, we feel a crazy desire to make cinema and to follow through on our convictions with the strongest of partners: the immense Imogen Poots who portrays her heroine in a gesture where finesse and power become one. This duo is brutal!
By Kristen Stewart. With Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, James Belushi… Duration 2h08. Released October 15, 2025.
