When famous actors decide to try their hand at filmmaking, the results can be — and often are — unremarkable by design. Timid and safe with a network TV aesthetic that screams “I’m a lot more afraid behind the camera than I am in front of it.” Not so of Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water.” Not in the slightest. Some movies are shot. This one was directed.

Which isn’t to suggest this aggressively fragmented adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir should be graded on a curve because its famous auteur dared to film on 16mm, or even because she had the skill required to adapt her source material with the same febrile porousness that made it such a striking piece of literature in the first place (a process that required the “Clouds of Sils Maria” star to invent her own language of elliptical thoughts and extreme close-ups). On the contrary,...