“In water, like in books, you can leave your life.” Imogen Poots’s Lidia Yuknavitch, a writer and swimmer recovering from a traumatic childhood, says this in a voice-over about halfway through Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. She’s walking into a lake after a weekend of playful and healing sex. “How many times did I slip into the depths,” she wonders, “secretly hoping to shed this useless skin and emerge something amphibious and without gender?”
It’s a potent enough idea that it’s become something of a trope: a woman at the end of her rope spontaneously deciding to walk, often fully clothed, into a body of water. In some instances, she just stands there, staring furiously at the horizon; other times, she lets the water subsume her — maybe forever or maybe just for 45 seconds, to freak herself out a little bit. The reasons vary. Sometimes she needs a break, a limbic space where her terrestrial problems can’t reach her. Sometimes she’s seeking a cleansing rebirth. Sometimes it’s about disappearing, self-annihilation. Sometimes she’s merely throwing a dramatic tantrum, as a treat. Regardless, when all else fails, a girl just needs to stand waist-deep in the sea, wearing wet denim and fuming.
This year, as a quarter-century (and possibly democracy) comes to a close, the trope is back in full force. All the cool girls are walking angrily and directly into bodies of water. There’s Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, storming into the Atlantic; Tessa Thompson’s titular character in Hedda walking straight into a river; Ava on Hacks ruminating about wandering into the Pacific; several female characters in the film Sound of Falling fantasizing about a river-based demise; Sophia Lillis’s deranged nanny in All Her Fault stumbling into Lake Michigan; and Chronology’s Lidia constantly submerging herself in pools and lakes and oceans. Even Taylor Swift sung about not drowning herself in The Fate of Ophelia.
But which body of water is the right one for you to walk into, preferably in most of your clothes, as a trenchant metaphor for your pain and suffering? Read on to decide.
Photo: The Forge/Everett Collection
Walking into various lakes (and diving into pools, though they don’t quite count for our purposes here — bodies of water need to maintain a semblance of bottomlessness to provide the level of necessary existential relief) acts as a sort of Matrix-like reality swap for The Chronology of Water’s Lidia Yuknavitch, whose on-land life is, when we first meet her, a nightmare of abuse and addiction. Based on the memoir from the real-life writer of the same name, Chronology tracks how Yuknavitch found her voice after surviving all manner of horrors. Water is a key component of that survival. She is, throughout the film, far more comfortable submerged than she is in the open air; at several points, her writing professor (Jim Belushi) asks her, “What are you, some kind of mermaid?” Water is, at first, a means of escape and later a means of therapeutic relief; through swimming and standing in it (and eventually through writing), Lidia faces down death, comes to terms with her pain, and heals herself.
Placid lakes are a nice place to walk into wearing all your clothing because they are easier to walk out of than oceans (due to tides and the unpredictability thereof). I’d suggest walking into a lake if your problems are temporary in nature but still quite heavy and require a purifying physical act. If you can find a lake that faces mountains, even better. When you exit the lake, have a spotter waiting with a towel.
Photo: Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK
All Her Fault, one of untold thousands of shows released this year about rich white people with dark secrets, follows Sarah Snook and Jake Lacy as Marissa and Peter, a couple who both work in finance, live in a mansion on the shores of Lake Michigan, and quietly hate each other. When their son, Milo, is kidnapped, their lives unravel, revealing every possible subtype of wealthy suburban drama: lopsided-child-rearing resentment, gambling debts, stolen trusts, swapped babies, intrafamily betrayals, and two women having red hair. At the white-hot center of it all is Carrie (Sophia Lillis), the second redhead in question, a troubled young woman who kidnaps Milo because she believes he’s actually her son. Near the end of episode seven, after Carrie’s father steals Milo back for the ransom money, murders her lover, and then gets shot and killed himself, Carrie realizes her cockamamie plot has come to a bleak end. She rolls up to the banks of Lake Michigan — fully clothed, of course — and walks right in. She stares up at the sky, prepared to drown herself, until suddenly, she decides to get out and grab a gun instead.
We’ve all been there. If your problems are of the kidnapping variety, a stormier lake is a better option because it indicates that you’re not merely walking into water to cleanse yourself but to commit an act of self-flagellation. You shouldn’t have stolen that child, even if he was swapped at the hospital. But it’s okay — the waves forgive you.
Photo: Kenny Laubbaucher/Max
On the fourth season of Hacks, Ava (Hannah Einbinder) suffers a series of crushing personal and professional setbacks in a matter of hours. Her ex-girlfriend mocks her on her own live late-night TV show; her boss, Deborah, (Jean Smart) tells her her jokes suck and cancels her segment; her throuple dumps her; she learns her writers have both a group chat without her and a habit of ordering expensive fish “for the table” at lunch. One of her employees gets a tooth gem instead of coming to work, after which Ava throws a full, bone-in branzino at a wall, drives through a parking gate, and speeds off into the horizon.
Nobody can find her for the duration of the episode. Has she fled the state? Gone on a bender? Hurt herself? Of course not. As Deborah discovers — via a line dancing lesbian demonstrating how to use Find My iPhone — Ava has gone where all women go when they must confront the void in a highly theatrical fashion: to the sea. At night. Deborah chases her there, spots a redhead swimming out into the middle of the ocean and panics, running in fully clothed after her. It’s not Ava but rather another woman facing the roiling depths of her own mortality by training for a polar-bear plunge. Ava is nearby pacing. “I thought you were drowning yourself!” yells Deborah. Ava sighs, exasperated, then replies with one of my favorite lines of the series: “I’m not suicidal. I just want to die!”
She goes on: “I’m not actually gonna self-harm, okay? And if I was going to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it Virginia Woolf–style and walk into the freezing ocean. I’d do pills or wear a suicide vest on Watch What Happens Live.” Later, warming up next to a heat lamp, she explains further: “I just got in my car and drove. I was just trying to get away from everything. And I ended up at the beach, which is so embarrassing now that I say it out loud. It’s so first thought after a breakdown.”
The Pacific is, in fact, a little “first thought,” but sometimes the first thought is the best thought. If your existential breakdown is multipronged and involves tooth gems, the Pacific is the best place to pace next to and/or stand in and consider how small your problems are compared with the powerful, all-knowing sea, which existed long before you and will be there long after you blow yourself up on Watch What Happens Live.
Photo: Transmission Films
The girls and women whose lives we follow in Sound of Falling, the acclaimed second feature from German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski that premiered at Cannes and the New York Film Festival earlier this year, span across a century, from the 1940s through present day. They speak to us in voice-overs as they matter-of-factly narrate their personal histories, all of which take place on the same small-town farm. The film is dreamy and dark, skipping across time and space like a rock on water as we delve in and out of alternatively lovely and cruel moments in these characters’ lives. This often takes the form of them confronting both the pleasures and violence of their mortality and womanhood: a little girl learning about death through its visitations upon her family, an adolescent learning that her body is no longer neutral or quite her own, a mother whose body turns against her via sudden paralysis.
Throughout, the river coursing next to the farm acts as a sort of leitmotif. Each character interacts with it in her own way: one paddleboards across it, one peacefully falls asleep next to it, one floats across it while her male family members ogle her. Some fill their pockets with stones and walk into it rather than face the horrors of war. Another, a young girl feeling salty about her mom not paying enough attention to her during a sunny day of swimming, vividly imagines being unintentionally left behind there and walking directly into it. We watch her fantasy unfold: She wraps herself up in her towel and rolls down the bank of the river, falling in. She lets her body drop down into the murky water, sinking into its depths. Her mother returns to find her, sees her floating corpse, and begins to scream.
Of course, none of this actually happens. She snaps out of her imaginings and trudges home grumpily. Within moments, she’s wrapped up in a towel, happy again, eating a sandwich. “I love when skin smells musty, like a river,” she says, smiling. This is what I would call the “Home Alone option.” Dreaming moodily of walking into a river so your family might appreciate you more is one of the most important and powerful childhood impulses. This body of water is a good choice for when you’re being ignored or you’re simply a Leo.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, based on Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play, Hedda Gabler, takes place over the course of a fabulous and doomed party. In this version, the titular Hedda, played by an ice-veined Tessa Thompson, is a closeted lesbian who’s hell-bent on creating chaos in the lives of those around her, if only to mirror her own internal state. She’s throwing the party alongside her husband (Tom Bateman), but she’s also invited her ex-lover Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), who’s on the verge of publishing a life-changing book with the help of her new lover, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots, who is now another leitmotif in this piece). Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on who you’re rooting for — Hedda’s attempts to blow shit up for everyone around her succeed entirely. By the end of the film, Lovborg has lost her manuscript (in the pond, no less), lost her lover, and suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
All of this doesn’t please Hedda as much as she thought it would. When she hears of Lovborg’s injury, and possible imminent death, she takes her guilty ass straight down to the pond near her house, fills her pockets with stones, and walks right in. In the original play, Hedda dies. DaCosta makes a more ambiguous choice. As Hedda stands in the pond, the water up to her neck, she hears yelling behind her: Eileen has survived. An unreadable smile plays across Hedda’s face before the screen cuts to black. On her decision to let Hedda live, DaCosta told USA Today: “She does things that are indefensible, but her pain and vulnerabilities are valid.”
So you’ve rained abject horror upon your ex — on purpose. Take it to the pond. Nobody ever really knows what’s in a pond. Snakes? A ghost? Anyway, the dark, unknowable expanse of a pond, ideally on a rich person’s grounds after a lush, disgusting party, is the perfect place to genuflect for being an unconscionable bitch whose pain and vulnerabilities are still valid.
Photo: A24
Near the end of Mary Bronstein’s fantastically bleak, primal scream of a film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Linda (Rose Byrne) has finally reached the rock bottom she’s been barely hovering above since the film began. There’s a gaping hole in her apartment ceiling (water burst through), a gaping hole in her daughter’s stomach (she needs a feeding tube for an unnamed pediatric eating disorder), and a gaping hole at her core (which Linda’s been filling with cheap wine and candy). Caroline, one of her therapy clients (Danielle Macdonald), has disappeared, leaving behind her baby and emailing Linda a video of Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001. (In a prison interview, Yates quoted the Bible: “Better to tie a millstone around your neck and throw yourself into the sea, rather than cause someone to stumble,” which this great interview with Bronstein gets into.) After Caroline shows up at the motel where Linda’s been staying, the two women have a confrontation, and Linda ends up chasing Caroline down the beach, then ultimately letting her run off toward the sea.
Soon after, Linda decides she’s had enough of the endlessly leaking holes in her life. She pulls out her daughter’s feeding tube in one horribly grotesque motion, then races to her apartment, where her husband, who’s been away and entirely unhelpful for most of the film, has shown up and patched the ceiling. When he accompanies her back to the hotel and realizes what she’s done to her daughter, he loses it. Linda, trapped and panicked, does the only thing that’s left to do: run to a body of water herself.
She tries desperately to throw herself into the Atlantic Ocean, but it pushes back on her. She hurls her body against it, and it hurls her right back. It won’t accept her annihilation. The movie ends with her lying on the sand, staring up at the sky, proclaiming to her daughter that she’ll “do better.” Bronstein said she conceived of the ending as relatively hopeful, despite its harrowing overtones. “I thought a lot about Virginia Woolf; she writes a lot about the ocean, and, of course, we know how she ended her life,” Bronstein said. “It’s quite a tragedy, the idea of putting rocks in your coat and just walking into the water — I’m sure it was horrifying, but it’s very romantic.”
Hurling yourself into the Atlantic only to be laid out on the sand is the most high-drama possibility here. It’s the epitome of this year’s trend: In 2025, walking into the sea is no longer the only option. Instead, what if the sea walks into you?
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