Chronology of Water (Kirsten Stewart, 2026)
Kirsten Stewart and Imogen Poots combine to excavate the septic rot of abuse. But all this mediated through fast cutting, violent, libidinous imagery. The frantic editing and colour grading harkens back to tv ads from the 90’s and 2000s. This is essentially a 2 hour long ad/music video. Except there’s no nikes on sale here. A style intended to manufacture desire is seized to reveal its putrified underbelly. Water, skin and the colours of pop Americana are splattered with every known bodily fluid: tears, sweat, blood, cum, piss and shit. You can hear the teeth grate and the coiled rage spitting, spraying venom like a crazed desert viper.
This isn’t a story about domesticating all that rage into art. I’m not familiar with the source material but the few lines narrated in rapid fire staccato are evidence of Stewart having successfully poured her inspiration into something deliberately agitated and formless.
I still wonder if this was held back by the narration. Sure, the fragments of the source text serve as guide to the mania. But it also has the effect of dampening the brute force of the imagery and the non linear narrative.
Pairing this with Sound of Falling for a contrasting double feature. Where Schilinski essays grief as inheritance that clings and destroys like cancer to a marrow, Stewart pictures something more volatile, untameable and unnamable.