Cannes Film Festival 2025: Kristen Stewart’s ‘The Chronology of Water’ Is A Potent, Unrelenting Directorial Debut

Based on the 2011 memoir by American college swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water rebukes the “vanity project” label often foisted on first time actors-turned-directors with its harsh, disorienting cuts, yielding an immensely uncomfortable movie. Elliptical in structure, but precise in its telling, Stewart’s masterful debut begins with brief, impressionistic flashes of blood from a sudden miscarriage running down the shower drain, alongside the agonizing wails of its protagonist: Yuknavitch, as played by English actress Imogen Poots. The subsequent narrative — which begins with stream-of-consciousness vignettes accompanied by overlapping, whispered voice over — guides us through the difficult tale of a childhood marred by abuse, and an adulthood spent trying to untangle its knots, while embodying the tumultuous, unspoken emotional fallout.

Making its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this period biopic verges on the avant-garde, two forms of cinema which are usually diametrically opposed, but are forced here into a powerful collision. There’s perhaps no better reflection of Stewart’s own career in front of the camera, as former YA mega-star turned international arthouse darling, who has worked with (and claims to learned from) the likes of Personal Shopper’s Olivier Assayas and Spencer’s Pablo Larraín. Given Yuknavitch’s stature as a prolific author, the story also becomes about its own telling — which is also true of the book — but the adaption builds on this theme in remarkable ways, to the point of Stewart engaging with the material as a means to project questions of her own authorship into its story.

Photo: Cannes Film Festival

Take, for instance, Poots’s livewire performance as a troubled teen (and eventually thirty-something), and whose physical and emotional language creates a character itching to crawl out of her own skin, as though she wants to be anywhere but on screen, not unlike a lifelong celebrity trying her hardest to avoid the spotlight. Her voice and mannerisms don’t so much resemble the real Yuknavitch as they do a prototypical Stewart performance’ the resemblance is uncanny.

However, before these similarities comes to light, the film remains laser focused on minor details, from the five o’clock shadow of Yuknavitch’s stern, short-tempered father as he yelled at her without reason, to the way her addict mother rested her hands on the table, refusing to intervene, to her older sister’s helpless stares. We’re introduced to Yuknavitch through her childhood memories of specific moments and sensations, opening the door to Stewart and editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s jagged, repetitive cuts between closeups of items and body parts only half in-frame.

This framing is also key to Yuknavitch discovering her attraction to women; when the camera embodies her gaze, it does so with a sense of shameful hesitation, at least at first. But by the time she throws herself headfirst into all manner of sexual experiences, Stewart and cinematographer Corey C. Waters’s camera becomes unafraid to focus gently on physical and emotional vulnerabilities, often in the same breath.

Scene transitions are often marked by harsh flashes in the 16mm film stock, as though the end of one memory (and the beginning of the next) were defined by light leaking into celluloid at the tail end of a reel. This, paired with the constant visual presence of dirt around the edges of the un-matted frame, creates almost Brechtian texture, as though the very act of translating this story into cinematic form were part of its story. Yuknavitch, of course, is not a filmmaker, but her attempts to scribble down her thoughts and feelings in moments of dismay — with the sound of pencil on paper becoming grating, among other repetitive cues — are just as key to Stewart’s narrative as the many terrible things that happen to Yuknavitch throughout her childhood.

The Chronology of Water is as much a film about a swimmer’s sexual abuse as it is about trying to make sense of the world through art. As Yuknavitch moves through young adulthood, with an untamed aggression which she can only channel through BDSM experiences (with both men and women), and which, alongside her dependence on alcohol, torpedoes several of her romantic relationships. Whether she knows it or not, she’s more like her parents than she would like.

The film’s nervous energy makes for a visceral tumble down a rabbit hole of self-loathing. However, it also creates space for the rare moments of reprieve. By establishing its offbeat, oppressive baseline, and pummeling the viewer with its artistic flourishes to the point of excess, the movie’s calmer, more considered scenes stand out in meaningful ways. This usually happens when Yuknavitch finds herself interacting with someone who finally understands her — like her professor and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey (a warm and marvelously enticing turn by Jim Belushi).

There are a host of avant-garde filmmakers who may have influenced the movies’ restless avant-garde quality (as far back as Soviet montage maestro Dziga Vertov), and just as many modern dramatists to whom the movie’s naturalistic performances can compare (for instance, John Cassavetes or Mike Leigh). However, perhaps the most fitting point of comparison — albeit one Stewart may not have intended — is actually the “golden age of TV” series Mad Men. The two couldn’t have less in common on the surface, since the weekly Matthew Weiner drama was mostly droll and austere. However, as a show about the commercial art of advertising, as told through the eyes of a uniquely gifted character keeping secrets close to his chest, it taught its audience how to interpret its poetry by presenting the world through its protagonist’s eyes. The Chronology of Water is a similar beast, as a movie zeroed in on the fragile dynamic between trauma and creation, to the point that anguish seems to reside within its every aesthetic decision.

Through its jarring sounds, its editing rhythms, and its tortured performances, it channels the spirit of both its authors — Yuknavitch and Stewart — and conjures painful memories in vivid hues. It’s a potent, unrelenting debut that feels like being thrown into the deep end, with Stewart as a cinematic lifeguard helping us make sense of utter chaos.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha)is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.