NEW YORK — Kristen Stewart makes her feature directing debut with “The Chronology of Water,” an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir that is now in limited U.S. release and powered by Imogen Poots’ uncompromising performance. Stewart turns Yuknavitch’s jagged life story into a restless collage of images and sound that moves the way memory does: in flashes, not chapters, Dec. 18, 2025.
Poots plays Yuknavitch as an athlete, a survivor and an artist-in-progress, often in the same breath. Her work gives the film its pulse, keeping Stewart’s bold formal swings tethered to something human, immediate and, at times, painfully intimate.
The Chronology of Water: turning fragments into film
“The Chronology of Water” follows Lidia from a violent home into competitive swimming in the 1980s, then through derailment, addiction and a stubborn push toward writing as a kind of rescue. The movie doesn’t smooth those years into a neat arc; it repeats moments, doubles back, and lets water—pools, showers, oceans—stand in for everything the character can’t yet say.
That intensity comes with a warning label. Stewart’s debut is frank about sexual abuse, substance use and the ways trauma can distort intimacy. Still, it avoids the tidy uplift of many biopics. As a review at RogerEbert.com observes, Stewart embraces a collage-like grammar, and Poots meets it with a performance that is raw without turning Lidia into a symbol.
In a Vogue interview, Poots described her bond with Stewart as a partnership where “we’re both sort of nerds,” a telling detail for a film that feels built from shared obsession rather than market math.
A decade-plus arc from memoir to movie
The book has been part of the literary conversation for years. When Yuknavitch’s memoir arrived in 2011, Publishers Weekly called it “triumphantly unrelenting,” a shorthand for a narrative that refuses clean redemption while insisting on the power of language.
Stewart has been chasing it almost as long. She told Willamette Week in 2018 that she intended to make “The Chronology of Water” her directing debut, and she returned with a finished feature in the Un Certain Regard lineup at Cannes this year. In an interview with Reuters after the premiere, she said, “I’m so proud of it. It’s like watching your kid go to school.” She also pointed to the line that first hooked her: “Can you hold life and death in the same sentence?”
Where The Chronology of Water is playing
The film’s U.S. rollout is already underway. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ release information, “The Chronology of Water” opened in limited theaters Dec. 5 and runs about 2 hours, 8 minutes—time Stewart uses to sit in the aftermath, not just the moment of impact.
The release continues overseas in early 2026. The BFI’s announcement says the film will open in the UK and Ireland Feb. 6, 2026, after a festival path that has already signaled Stewart’s arrival as a serious new filmmaker.
Stewart’s debut may divide viewers, but it rarely feels cautious. And in the middle of its rough waters, Poots delivers the kind of fearless performance that makes “The Chronology of Water” hard to shake—and harder to dismiss.
