“I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order… It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common,” the Oregon-based author Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water.
It follows, then, that director Kristin Stewart’s film adaptation of the book opens without clear exposition. Instead, the camera is submerged, trained upward toward a figure in a red swimsuit. Blood spills onto a shower’s tile floor. The two images—which happen years apart in Lidia’s (Imogen Poots) life—set the tone for a film revealed in fragments of trauma. First, Yuknavitch trains for a swimming competition as a teenager; then, in her twenties, her daughter is stillborn, and she bleeds beneath the shower’s spray, stunned by grief.
Stewart’s fractured timeline is central to her translation of Yuknavitch’s fiercely internal, experimental text. Chronology revolves, in many ways, around Lidia’s relationships with men, but it also positions her as a slippery, larger-than-life mermaid, swimming around, beyond, and in spite of them all. The story is at times relentless and exhausting; it’s also an accurate depiction of complex trauma, in which the past and present intermingle.
Lidia is a very good swimmer. Growing up in ’70s San Francisco and later in Gainesville, Florida, the pool serves as a refuge from her father (Michael Epp)—a sexually abusive, rage-filled architect, always chainsmoking in the next room, his eyes piercing and empty—and her mother (Susannah Flood), a checked-out alcoholic who diverts her gaze. When young Lidia’s (Anna Wittowsky) teen sister Claudia (Marlena Sniega) leaves home for college, she gives Lidia a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s Saint Joan of Arc. It’s a fitting gift for a girl battling against an all-powerful man, a girl who seems to burn inside.
As she grows older and more defiant, Lidia’s interior world is preoccupied by bodies in locker rooms, sweat dripping, passed flasks, and water water water. “My bedroom holds the wet of my body,” she murmurs in voiceover. “It smells like my sweat and chlorine.” Her escape from home is a full-ride swimming scholarship to Texas Tech, where she packs up and heads after calling her father a “motherfucker.” There, she disappears into an epic poem of pills, drinking, and sex with people of all genders. Lidia meets Philip (Earl Cave), a gentle troubadour who is no match for her deeply wounded anger. He strums a guitar while Lidia spits on him.
Things unravel. Lidia tries heroin. She gets pregnant and runs away to Eugene to live with Claudia (Thora Birch), now a professor at the University of Oregon (UO). Actors Birch and Poots navigate the homecoming with nuance and careful expressions, conveying the story of their characters’ father without ever naming his abuse directly. Then, Lidia’s baby is stillborn. The delivery room is silent. A cart rolls down the hall.
Phillip and Lidia throw a little pink box of ashes into the ocean. It comes the fuck back, bobbing on the tide, trauma resurfacing in the most literal way possible. The two laugh, an unexpected expression of grief unfolding in one small moment. It’s a standout scene in which mourning feels both contained and vast. Lidia wades into the water. Her baby’s ashes swirl and stick to her coat. Grief perseveres.
A little levity arrives when Lidia participates in Ken Kesey’s (Jim Belushi) collaborative novel experiment, held with a group of UO students in the late ’80s. Kesey is warm and noisy and totally likable. He rambles about Qualuudes, plays a harmonica, and pushes the importance of ego disintegration.
“I know what happened to you. Death is a motherfucker,” he muses in Lidia’s ear. And later: “No one has enough to hold what happens to us.” It’s a scary sentiment to hear from a literary figure like Kesey. If he can’t hold Lidia’s grief, who can?
Stewart’s directorial sense is most compelling when it depicts Lidia’s survival strategies. During the film’s most disturbing flashbacks, the camera looks away, toward ceiling corners and rain splattering against a window. This visual rendering of dissociation allows form and content to reinforce each other. Yet at times, the approach also creates distance. Stewart frequently relies on voiceover to fill in gaps—instead of hearing her father’s graphic sexual language in a scene, for example, Lidia tells the viewer what he said, creating a layer of opacity like a protective membrane.
Structured around five chapters—Holding Breath, Under Blue, The Wet, Resuscitations, and The Other Side of Drowning—the film also leans hard on aquatic metaphor. Its repetitions and extreme close-ups assemble a visual word bank: flesh, wet, hair, steam, salt, drool, liquid, pain, baby. Trauma surfaces, screams, numbs, and resurfaces, bleeding and suturing in no particular order.
Like its source material, Chronology is complicated. Some Letterboxd reviews find that the film—which was shot in dreamy 16mm—comes too close to a Tumblr-era sheen, suggesting that it reframes sexual abuse to fit a collaged, screenshottable aesthetic. And at times, Stewart’s stylish approach does seem to aestheticize pain. Yet the film is often brutally honest, too. Both things can be true.
The Chronology of Water is an ambitious project by an ambitious director. The film was a labor of obsession for Stewart, who spent eight years completing it and announced in 2024 that she would pause acting until she could secure enough funding to cross the finish line. Its depictions of traumatic memory are relentless to the point of being draining—which is both difficult to watch and accurate. Lidia’s life moves without a clear upward trajectory, instead building and crashing like a wave. Although the film pauses on her happy ending, complete with the trappings of normalcy, it’s evident she still has many laps left to swim.
In an interview with Hawthorne Books publisher and editor Rhonda Hughes, Yuknavitch quoted Faulkner: “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief.” The Chronology of Water bathes in that bravery.
The Chronology of Water is playing at Regal Fox Tower, 846 SW Park, and at Living Room Theaters, 341 SW 10th, with an after-screening Q&A with Kristen Stewart, Lidia Yuknavitch, and others at Living Room Theaters on Fri Jan 16 (SOLD OUT).
