Viewer Advice: Contains themes of child sexual abuse.

Kristen Stewart’s splashy Cannes-premiering directorial debut poetically adapts writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir.

Lidia (an astonishing Imogen Poots, Vivarium, MIFF 2019) only feels whole when she’s in the water. Kicking through lap after lap, she can temporarily float free of the cold, rageful father who sexually abused her and her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch) while their apathetic mother turned away. Out of the pool, Lidia flounders, ruining her college swimming scholarship with booze, drugs and reckless sex and lashing out contemptuously at anyone who shows her kindness. But when she joins a collaborative creative writing class led by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author and countercultural hero Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi), Lidia finds the same fluid escape in writing. She’s back in her lane – focused, flourishing.

As an actor, Kristen Stewart (Personal Shopper, MIFF 2016) has been one of cinema’s most subtle, fascinating interpreters of interiority. So it makes sense that her directorial debut, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s visceral 2011 memoir, is no average creative biopic. Eschewing unnecessary exposition, Stewart invites comparisons to Terrence Malick as she tells Lidia’s story in intense, elliptical vignettes that ebb and flow on currents of memory, while Poots is as tender and fierce onscreen as she is dreamlike and sardonic in voiceover.

“What makes Chronology such a masterful debut is Stewart’s innate understanding of how to translate this idea – of the visceral, invisible ways that our bodies keep the score – to the screen.” – RogerEbert.com

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