The Chronology of Water

Kristen Stewart spent close to a decade trying to finance an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's 2011 memoir, and eventually made it in Latvia with European money. It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2025 — a directorial debut by a very famous actor, arriving with the scepticism that guarantees, and disarming most of it.

Imogen Poots plays Yuknavitch, a swimmer good enough to get a scholarship out of a house ruled by a violent father, who then loses it and spends her twenties in Oregon working through drink, drugs, a series of relationships and a great deal of water. Stewart shoots on 16mm in fragments — bodies, tiles, light through a pool surface — cutting associatively rather than chronologically, in a structure taken directly from the book's refusal of a tidy recovery arc. Jim Belushi turns up as Ken Kesey, who taught Yuknavitch at Oregon.

The Cannes reception split along a familiar line between those who found the fragmentation expressive and those who found it exhausting, and it is genuinely both. What is not in question is the seriousness: Stewart has made a film about trauma that refuses redemption, refuses to sequence the events for the audience's comfort, and trusts Poots to hold the centre without softening anything. It is the most ambitious actor-turned-director debut in years.