‘The Chronology of Water’ Review: A Hauntingly Fragmentary Drama

One of the primary photographs in The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the identical title, is a close-up of blood flowing right into a bathe drain, after Lidia (Imogen Poots) suffers a miscarriage. It’s not the primary time that Lidia’s physique has betrayed her, and it received’t be the final, however it might be the betrayal that cuts the deepest.

Lidia doesn’t scream when she’s finally pressured to move her stillborn little one out of her. She merely and quietly latches onto the element that regardless of the remaining of her little one’s physique being corpse blue, her lips have been nonetheless pink. It’s a heartbreaking second that Stewart tellingly lingers on. The place Poots largely portrays Lidia as a frayed, electrical nerve for many of the movie, on this second she’s a girl totally hollowed out by the quiet horror of all of it.

Stewart’s selection of a large shot to seize Lidia’s complete face stands in stark distinction to the uncomfortable close-ups and odd focal factors that outline the remaining of the movie. Lidia might not scream, however Stewart directs the scene with a fury that presents each unassuming scrap of the girl’s reminiscence because the scene of a criminal offense. Which, to be truthful, a lot of it was for Yuknavitch.

Just like the memoir it’s based mostly on, Stewart’s movie takes its title severely. If a girl’s life is a physique of nonetheless water operating deep, the poisonous matter that drops into Lidia’s life is years of childhood emotional and sexual abuse by the hands of her father (Michael Epp). The final beats of Lidia’s story really feel acquainted, which is its personal form of crime, what with accounts of abuse and assault being so terrifyingly ubiquitous that they virtually really feel mundane. And the sweetness of Stewart’s focus is how she excavates the profound from the mundane.

Stewart fixates on the corners of rooms, the patterns of folks’s pores and skin, the wrinkles on faces, and extra, with the stream-of-consciousness enhancing making some masterful connections between the tiny particulars of each touchstone second in Lidia’s life. All of Lidia’s anger, grief, and hate stemming from her trauma intensifies over the course of her life, and the thrust of the story is within the determined try and calm the waters, or no less than discover the braveness to sign to somebody that she’s drowning with out taking somebody into the depths together with her.

It’s a decades-long course of that has its collateral harm, on the whole lot from property to relationships. Lidia’s physique is a Judas all through her life, and above all of Stewart’s different fixations throughout her hauntingly fragmentary movie is a near-Cronenbergian fascination and revulsion with the feminine kind. Lidia’s physique is an effigy that she’s prepared to stab, slash, throw towards objects and folks, and each on occasion even respect and love in lurid element.

Poots, for her half, channels an unlimited, darkish rainbow of damaging feelings, making it so the steadily growing moments of peace, connection, pleasure, and acceptance, all onerous received, that come later really feel all of the extra earned and cathartic. Each the ugliest and most elegant, stunning moments of Lidia’s soul are captured in razor-sharp shards by Stewart, making this much less a feature-length directorial debut than a violently explosive breach into a brand new facet of her craft.