The Chronology of Water review: Kristen Stewart makes a traumatic splash with directorial debut

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 maltreatment memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is moving a precise precocious temperature, though ne'er precisely collapsing into outright feverishness oregon torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of symptom and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s travel towards recovering the earthy worldly of acquisition to beryllium sifted and recycled into literate success.

The contiguous time catastrophes of failed relationships, portion and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of puerility with utmost closeups connected remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders connected cliche a little, but determination is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Lidia herself, good played by Imogen Poots, is simply a young pistillate who was abused successful her teenage years by her clenched and furious designer begetter (Michael Epp) – on with her sister (Thora Birch) who often sacrificed herself to their father’s loathsome attentions to divert him distant from Lidia – and their parent went into depressive denial throughout.

Lidia throws herself into being a fanatically focused aquatics squad champ which gets her a assemblage assistance that she messes up done booze and coke. The movie shows however successful the h2o she feels free; swimming laps against the timepiece gives her a intent and an flight – a cancellation of identity.

But present Lidia has a unspeakable secret: it is not simply that she is an maltreatment subsister – she masturbates incessantly reasoning astir it, and utterly despises her weak-beta antheral fellow (Earl Cave) for being bully and gentle. (That, and being spanked by her aquatics coach, is besides a complicating origin for her involvement successful BDSM.)

So erstwhile her creator accidental arrives, truthful does a toxic situation of daddy issues. Her attempts astatine penning get her the accidental to enactment successful an experimental collaborative caller being masterminded by the counterculture fable Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) whose involvement successful her appears unsettlingly similar her father’s. Is past repeating itself? Is degradation the terms you wage for occurrence successful penning – oregon swimming – oregon anything? Her ain writerly improvement is shown by the books she reads herself – Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Joan of Arc arsenic a kid, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury arsenic a student, and then, arsenic a young writer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.

These idiosyncratic stories and their movie versions person been undermined precocious by notorious fake memoirist JT LeRoy – whose change ego Savannah Knoop was really played by Kristen Stewart successful a surface mentation of her troubled life.

But for each that, and immoderate callow indie indulgences, this is an earnest and heartfelt portion of work, and Stewart has guided strong, intelligent performances.