Film Review: Kristen Stewart's Trauma-Soaked Adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water

"director Kristin Stewart's film adaptation of the book opens without clear exposition. Instead, the camera is submerged, trained upward toward a figure in a red swimsuit. Blood spills onto a shower's tile floor. The two images-which happen years apart in Lidia's (Imogen Poots) life-set the tone for a film revealed in fragments of trauma. First, Yuknavitch trains for a swimming competition as a teenager; then, in her twenties, her daughter is stillborn, and she bleeds beneath the shower's spray, stunned by grief."

"Stewart's fractured timeline is central to her translation of Yuknavitch's fiercely internal, experimental text. Chronology revolves, in many ways, around Lidia's relationships with men, but it also positions her as a slippery, larger-than-life mermaid, swimming around, beyond, and in spite of them all. The story is at times relentless and exhausting; it's also an accurate depiction of complex trauma, in which the past and present intermingle."

"Growing up in '70s San Francisco and later in Gainesville, Florida, the pool serves as a refuge from her father (Michael Epp)-a sexually abusive, rage-filled architect, always chainsmoking in the next room, his eyes piercing and empty-and her mother (Susannah Flood), a checked-out alcoholic who diverts her gaze. When young Lidia's (Anna Wittowsky) teen sister Claudia (Marlena Sniega) leaves home for college, she gives Lidia a copy of Vita Sackville-West's Saint Joan of Arc."

The film opens without clear exposition, beginning with a submerged camera trained upward toward a figure in a red swimsuit and showing blood on a shower floor. The narrative unfolds in fragments, moving between Lidia as a competitive swimmer, a young mother who experiences a stillbirth, and recurring traumatic memories. Lidia's relationship with men and her survival are central, while water and swimming function as refuge and recurring motif. Childhood abuse by a rage-filled, sexually abusive father and a checked-out alcoholic mother shape her interior life. The nonlinear structure aims to reflect complex trauma, where past and present intermingle.

Read at Portland Mercury