Critics Campus 2025 participant Armani Hollindale dives into the themes, motifs and inspirations, as well as the inter-bleeding between representation and reality, that flow within Kristen Stewart’s feature directorial debut The Chronology of Water.

After Kristen Stewart filmed the cliff-jumping scene in The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), she said in a behind-the-scenes interview, “I’m so bad with water.” Perhaps moving to higher ground behind the camera was the only way to confront her fears.

If you pay attention to the trajectory of Stewart’s stardom – a constellation of confessions, choices and fandom – you can quickly draw a map that leads to The Chronology of Water, her feature directorial debut that crafts a story of water, the body and words. It is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, but our innate curiosity about celebrities makes it difficult to engage with Stewart’s voice as a director without also sensing her distinctive star aura. This fixation appears at every opportunity. “Being a woman is a really violent experience,” Stewart says in a Cannes interview; Yuknavitch’s story becomes her own.

Imogen Poots embodies Yuknavitch, portraying her abusive upbringing, her voice under constant attack, and the replenishing salvation she finds through swimming and literature – though it’s hardly a linear biography. Stewart is drawn to the fragmented structure of Yuknavitch’s memoir, stitching together memories and flashbacks across five chapters: ‘Holding Breath’, ‘Under Blue’, ‘The Wet’, ‘Resuscitations’ and ‘The Other Side of Drowning’. Much like how a starfish can reproduce through fragmentation, each chapter splits open to birth the next. Stewart vivisects the open wounds of Yuknavitch’s childhood, her sexual trauma in the hands and face of her father, and the emotional loss of her mother.

Stewart wields an intense devotion to the titular metaphor, frequently transforming words into images of water. Her envy for the motifs of literature becomes painfully clear. Mould spores emerge from a damp corner. Blood drains over tiles. Lidia perspires with fear. Back into the pool. Her water breaks. Her sex is wet, coming and going. Tears well. Eyes, bloodshot. She draws a smile in the condensation of the plane window, over the seas. And so often her words, too – lubricated by the flask. In these metaphors, Stewart gathers evidence for the sentimentalist. The miserabilist, at times. The Chronology of Water is an unforgiving succession of associated aquatics, obliterating the line between story and motif. Water rises to the surface of the film, but the collage remains a fragile assemblage of signs. In such decadence, the work falls victim to the cheapening intercutting of metaphorical stimuli.

Similarly, Stewart loves a heavy-handed reference, serving research and inspiration without shame. Kim Gordon cameos as a BDSM dominatrix. Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless sits neatly on a desk. Earl Cave makes a flimsy appearance. Figures are pasted into the frame like cultural name-drops – billboards for Semiotext(e) tragics, or pop-ups for subculture.

The Chronology of Water

I cannot seem to shake The Chronology of Water’s uncanny resemblance to Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, with its many pool and beach scenes, and their sharing of Poots’ tantalising mystique. She enters the two films diving into the water. In both, voiceovers fold back across images of the past, illuminating silent scenes, bringing Poots down to a series of looks; her character has feelings she can’t put into words. Subtle parallels to other works persist elsewhere. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia submerges her head under the water, holding her arms in a cross over her chest; this evokes an identical scene from Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (MIFF 2003). In another apparent reference to Ramsay’s film, Lidia sits at her desk, her face lit by a computer screen, and looks over her shoulder to the body of her lover.

In press events, Stewart often slips into referring to the character’s experience with shared pronouns: “I hired Kim Gordon to tell us that she was proud of us,” she recounts in the same Cannes interview, “and that we were good girls.” It becomes increasingly clear that her time with this story may have served as an outlet for years of repression within the Hollywood star system. Whereas Yuknavitch was able to process her trauma through literature, Stewart has seemingly used cinema as therapy for her own Hollywood woes. The film marries the art of adaptation with that of expression. Through it, Stewart confronts the industry that chose, post–Twilight fame, to exploit rather than explore her complexity. Here, she is coming up for air.

The memoir form presents Stewart with the opportunity to remove proximity: she adapts someone else’s story so that she may freely implicate her personal narrative into the film without repercussion. The memoir is the ideal formula. A derivative of the diary. Obsessive. Recoiling. Discursive. Indulgent. Rapacious. The personal story is personal and therefore private, forgiving. You can change the story you once told, and therefore change yourself. You can’t prevent the syndrome of celebrity worship, but you can make peace with the mishaps and misconceptions of your adolescent rise to fame.

Just as Joan of Arc becomes both a recurring motif and an accomplice in Yuknavitch’s writing, the character of Lidia provides the same source of guidance to Stewart. Yuknavitch’s story is no longer hers in a traditional sense; she is now a symbol for the violence that women must harbour silently until they reach breaking point. Lidia gives both Stewart and the audience permission to embrace their feral instincts, honouring necessary outbursts. In these eruptions, Stewart treads the line between the source of pain and its outlet, the profane and the sacred, the Hollywood regime and the freedom of expression. The Chronology of Water is a wishful baptism for Stewart’s directing career, but her narrative of stardom swims just below the surface.

The Chronology of Water screens on Friday 15 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.