Let "The Chronology of Water" Hold You

Kirsten Stewart’s biographical film The Chronology of Water (2025), based on Lidia Yuknavitch's work, captures Yuknavitch’s memory as she navigates trauma, sexuality, love, family, and writing. Memory is presented as ocean waves, colliding and roaring. Until Lidia can come to terms with the water of memory, she will be lost. Here, water takes on new and multiple meanings: life and death, breath and drowning, time and memory, filth and cleansing. 

The story is based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s life, an American writer whose memoir explores the boundaries of womanhood, bodies, and trauma. We follow Lidia as she navigates her fractured life, one where the past collides with the present. The Yuknavitch household has a red-white-and-blue veneer of the American dream, but the flag veils gaping wounds of sexual violence and addiction. Lidia’s father sexually abuses her. Lidia imagines herself as a mermaid—not out of childhood fantasy, but out of a desperate need for an escape. She hopes to emerge from the water “as something amphibious, sexless? It’s not like I didn’t want to have sex, but I wanted to control it” (The Chronology of Water). Competitive swimming becomes her sanctuary and later her way of escaping her tortured household—a swim scholarship to Texas Tech. At the university, she drowns in freedom and unresolved trauma as she loses herself in drug and alcohol addiction. Trying to fill the hole, she marries a man who is the opposite of her father, and eventually divorces him. Tragically, she later births a stillborn daughter, whose ashes become one with the ocean. Lidia spirals further as she claims, “Something in me feels born still” (The Chronology of Water). From there, she embarks on a long journey of self-discovery and rebirth through writing. Like swimming, writing helps her heal her wounds and make amends with the past. 

The structure of the film is like an ocean, turbulent and crashing—waves bring in old memories, waves bring us to the present, waves wash us into the future. The film functions as a montage, showing the audience everything while requiring them to stitch the fragments together. It evokes Sergei Eisenstein's theory that “conflict lies at the very basis of art” (Eisenstein 145). The collision of shots creates a visual friction that mirrors Lidia’s internalized trauma. The nonlinear storytelling of The Chronology of Water (2025) creates a subjectivity that feels intrusive; the audience wades too deeply into the water. It feels like we shouldn’t be witnessing her very private pain. The audience is inside Lidia’s mind as she experiences violence, joy, freedom, love, sadness, pain, and anger. These waves break down the psyche of Lidia, and the audience gets seasick with her. Even now, as I write this, a little bile rises in my throat.

Stewart’s directorial debut is beautiful and striking. While the film's structure is fluid and fragmented to emphasize the conflict and collision of Lidia’s journey, the shots are not lost; each is a powerful image. Stewart uses wide shots sparingly, instead focusing the audience’s attention on detail to visceral effect—to feel and smell skin, water, stone, blood, leather, tile. Touch and texture are vital elements of shot composition, pushing the intimacy between Lidia and the audience. Stewart shot the film on 16 mm celluloid, painting it with a raw sand-like texture that is both nostalgic and dreamlike, but contrasted with the tactile visuals and sounds, it becomes nauseatingly real. Sound accentuates the touch, with heartbeats, sweat, slurps, pencil scratches, and moans. Adding to the visceral qualities are the saturated colors: red, white, blue, pink, yellow, and green. The tactile feel of the film and the starkness of the color give it a nostalgic quality that all collide to tell a deeply American story: a man extorting a woman’s bodily autonomy. 

Lidia’s struggle for bodily autonomy is not an isolated tragedy; it is the modern pulse of a long, violent, and legalistic history of ownership over women's bodies in America. 

In North Carolina, in State v. Rhodes (1868), in which a husband whipped and raped his wife, the NC Supreme Court ruled that they would only intervene if the violence was excessive, caused permanent injury, or was malicious, and that rape doesn’t exist in a marital setting (Siegel 2154). This legal precedent essentially codified domestic abuse, provided that men didn’t break any bones. In 1993,  Marital rape finally became a crime in all 50 states (“Marital Rape”).

The Supreme Court Case Buck v. Bell (1927) legalized forced sterilizations of institutionalized people who are deemed "unfit” (Buck v. Bell).

In 1965 alone, illegal abortion was the official cause of death for 17% of all recorded pregnancy-related deaths (Herndon et al. 14).

​​In 1992, the National Women's Study revealed that 13% of women had experienced a completed forcible rape, but when including attempted rape and updated methodology, the CDC later established the lifetime risk at roughly 1 in 5 (18-20%) (Kilpatrick et al. 2; Black et al. 18).

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, ruling there is no constitutional right to abortion—stripping away women’s bodily autonomy (Dobbs v. Jackson). 

In 2024, the World Health Organization published a study that declared that 1 in 3 (30%) of women worldwide have been subjected to sexual violence ("Violence Against Women"). 

The Chronology of Water is a chronology. Stewart uses the film to pack a long history of sexual violence into Lidia’s specific experience. Stewart forces the viewer to confront the bloody truth and witness a woman learn to cope through control or loss of control—competitive swimming, sex, drugs, and anger, and ultimately through finding her voice as a writer. 

The Chronology of Water is a work of art that forces the audience to face reality, to see a festering wound, but also to see it heal and become a scar. As Lidia says, "I'm not trying to creep you out. I'm trying to be precise." (The Chronology of Water). Even though the subject is hard, you should watch it precisely because it's hard. You need to stare at the festering wound and acknowledge it so it can heal. For Lidia, it is water that holds Lidia. Water is time. Water is an escape. Water is the fluid within Lidia that allows her to move beyond unspeakable pain. Let The Chronology of Water hold you, I promise you will not regret it. 

Works Cited

Black, Michele C., et al. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf.

Buck v. Bell. 274 U.S. 200, Supreme Court of the United States, 1927. Justia Law, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/.

"Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization." Center for Reproductive Rights, 2024, reproductiverights.org/cases/scotus-mississippi-abortion-ban-dobbs-jackson-womens-health/.

Eisenstein, S. M. "Beyond the Shot." Selected Works: Volume I: Writings, 1922-34, edited and translated by Richard Taylor, BFI Publishing / Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 138–50.

“Marital Rape in the United States.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Feb. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_in_the_United_States.

Herndon, Joy, et al. “Abortion Surveillance—United States, 1998.” MMWR Surveillance Summaries, vol. 51, no. SS-03, 7 June 2002, pp. 1-32. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5103a1.htm.

Kilpatrick, Dean G., et al. Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. National Victim Center and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, 1992, vawnet.org/material/rape-america-report-nation.

Siegel, Reva B. "The Rule of Love: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy." The Yale Law Journal, vol. 105, no. 8, June 1996, pp. 2117–207. Yale Law School, law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/Siegel_TheRuleOfLove.pdf.

Spence, Cathryn. Review of Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, edited by Tim Stretton and Krista Kesselring. The English Historical Review, vol. 130, no. 546, Oct. 2015, pp. 1249–51. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev249.

The Chronology of Water. Directed by Kristen Stewart, performances by Imogen Poots and Jim Belushi, Scott Free Productions / The Forge, 2025.

"Violence Against Women." World Health Organization, 9 Mar. 2021, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women.

Yuknavitch, Lidia. "Bio." Lidia Yuknavitch, lidiayuknavitch.net/bio-1. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026.

Ellison Martin (CC’29) is a filmmaker from Texas and a current Columbia University student majoring in Film & Media Studies. Her documentary Don’t Mess with Texas: An Abortion Story won the Grand Prize at the Tribeca Festival in the RFK Human Rights “Speak Truth to Power” competition and the UIL “Nobelity Social Impact Award.” With over 20 short films and training in directing, cinematography, and screenwriting at UCLA and Yale, Martin’s work blends craft with activism, confronting themes of justice, gender, and identity. Rooted in her background as a youth organizer, she continues to develop new narrative shorts at Columbia that harness cinema as a catalyst for empathy and social change.

@ellison.film