It was in 2000 that Kristen Stewart made her first, unaccredited appearance on screen, aged ten, as Ring Toss Girl in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.

Since then she has appeared in over sixty films, including the Twilight franchise, where she made a name for herself playing Bella Swan.

Now, at the age of 35, she makes her directorial debut, with an adaptation of lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 novel of the same name, which is quite challenging.

As a young woman, Lidia (Imogen Poots) finds an escape from her abusive father (Michael Epp) in the pool on the swimming team.

She manages to flee his grasp when she moves to college, but she soon discovers that he still has a hold on her, affecting her life in nearly every aspect.

Stewart’s debut is certainly unusual, but for all the wrong reasons. It comes across as trying too far hard, to the point that it’s a trite and pretentious mess.

From the very first scene, where she uses a square, retro framing device – as if shot with an old school film camera – is used throughout, to convey a sense of the past through the protagonist’s ‘journey’.

And then you have the narrative which is a little too free form, which could be described as poetic, but only on the understanding that bad poetry exists, which is very much the case here.

Every scene is Stewart the director – and screenwriter- waving her arms manically in the air for attention, in a way that makes her nothing more than a needy attention seeker.

This means that her film is devoid of any sense of reality, making it a shocking example of style over substance. This is unfortunate as she attempts to tell a very serious story, of a young woman suffering from abuse, sexual and mental, and finding friction out of the water at every turn.

The fact it’s all style, means that Lidia is a character that you can neither empathise with nor care for, despite her going through some traumatic times in her life. She is completely unrelatable as she spurts out gibberish, parading as poetry, as the film almost feels like its treading water, with no energy or momentum.

It’s a tedious watch, one that could well win a prize – for the film that produced the most walk-outs in cinemas, as it zaps the very energy out of you like Colin Robinson in What We Do in The Shadows.

You get the impression that Stewart feels that a classic way of telling a story is beneath her, and although it’s commendable filmmakers want to bring something different to the cinematic table, it helps if it is coherent and appealing, in some way, and not a pompous attempt to stroke your own ‘creative’ ego.

What it is then, is the definitive example of what a directorial debut looks like within, firmly up its own rectum.

The Chronology of Water is both impenetrable and unlikeable, that not only presents the fact that it is not a piece of entertainment, on any level, but embraces it.

It may have gotten away with that attitude in an art museum, as one of those works of ‘art’ installations that perform in a dark space where art lovers can drift in and out of - as it wouldn’t make any more sense to sit down and watch the whole thing, and who is looking for sense in a place like that anyway? – but one thing is for certain, it doesn’t belong in cinemas.

With the average cinema goer, it’s likely to produce an emotional range from indifference to hatred, with that needle spending a lot of time in the hatred red, as it did for us.

It is, without question, the worst theatrical release of the year, which is easy enough considering we’ve just reached February, but its heinous qualities could be more enduring than that, and make it one of the worst films ever, which is some kind of achievement for a directorial debut, making the ultimate damp squib experience.