HKIFF Film Review: The Chronology of Water 水的編年史 (2025) - USA / France / UK / Latvia
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a scene about halfway through Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water” where Imogen Poots, playing the memoirist Lidia Yuknavitch, stands in a swimming pool at night. The water is black. The lights are harsh. She is not swimming. She is drowning, slowly, on purpose, and the camera just watches. That’s the movie. It watches. It waits. It holds its breath until you feel like you might pass out.
Stewart’s directorial debut is not a story. It is a wound. An adaptation of Yuknavitch’s cult memoir, the film refuses the polite architecture of cause-and-effect. Instead, it throws you into the deep end of a life shaped by an abusive father, the brutal physicality of competitive swimming, and the messy, years-long process of learning to inhabit a body that has only ever felt like a crime scene. The chronology here is not linear. It’s tidal. Memories lap over each other. Moments of adolescent triumph cut directly into scenes of adult self-destruction. You are never quite sure when you are, but you are always acutely aware of how it feels.
And how it feels is like sandpaper on a sunburn. Poots, who has been a quietly interesting presence in films for a decade, here becomes something else entirely. She is feral. Her Lidia moves like an animal caught in a trap—all sharp angles, clenched jaws, and sudden, terrifying releases of violence. This is not the pretty suffering of Oscar bait. This is the real thing: the ugly, sweaty, snotty work of trying not to disappear. When she swims, you feel every desperate pull of her arms. When she crashes, you wince. It is a career-defining performance, the kind that makes you go back and reassess everything else she has done.
Stewart, working in grainy 16mm, makes the frame feel small and intimate, then suddenly expansive and lonely. Water is everywhere—pools, oceans, rain, tears, bathtubs, the amniotic fluid of memory. It is the element of both trauma and baptism, death and rebirth. The film is at its best in these purely sensory passages, when dialogue falls away and all that’s left is the texture of skin, the sound of breathing, the way light fractures through a lane rope.
But a film that lives by the vibe can also die by it. Stewart’s commitment to fragmentation means that some characters never cohere. Jim Belushi shows up as Ken Kesey, and it’s exactly as strange and distracting as it sounds. He appears, says a few cryptic things, and vanishes—a cameo that feels less like a storytelling choice and more like a private joke. Other supporting figures drift in and out like ghosts that the screenplay forgot to name. The film trusts you to keep up, but occasionally that trust feels like negligence.
More problematic is the emotional stamina required. “The Chronology of Water” is relentless. It does not offer easy catharsis. It does not build toward a triumphant third-act breakthrough where Lidia hugs her younger self and cries. The ending is honest—bruised, tentative, more truce than victory—but getting there is exhausting. By the second hour, the bleakness starts to feel less like a artistic choice and more like a dare. You may find yourself wanting a single scene where someone just laughs.
And yet. And yet. There is something here that cannot be dismissed. Stewart is not trying to impress you with her formal control. She is trying to reproduce a consciousness—fractured, raw, sometimes incoherent—and she succeeds more often than she fails. This is not a movie for everyone. It is not even a movie for most people. But for those who have lived in the body Yuknavitch describes, or who recognize the particular loneliness of the survivor, “The Chronology of Water” will feel like a hand reaching into the dark.
It is a strong, messy, deeply human debut. Stewart has made a film that drowns occasionally in its own ambition. But she has also made one that knows how to swim. (Neo, 2026)
