TORONTO, Canada—Mike Flanagan has made his name in the horror genre, and yet like his greatest spiritual inspiration Stephen King—whose work he’s brought to the screen with Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep—he’s first and foremost a dramatist with an abiding interest in the things that make us tick, bring us together, and haunt us both in the bright morning and the dark of night.
Thus, though The Life of Chuck is an intensely faithful adaptation of a King novella (from 2020’s If It Bleeds), it’s a film that’s as sweet as it is scary, and whose frights are the sort that come from all-too-relatable fears about being alone, being apart, and being unable to hold onto the people and memories that matter most.
Split into three acts that proceed in reverse chronological order, The Life of Chuck—which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival—is a story about finding the beat, the path, the rhythm, and the magic of life, and if that sounds hokey, well, it is, at least as often as it is moving.
As he did with 2016’s Before I Wake, Flanagan operates in a decidedly sentimental vein with his latest, and there are instances when the light beaming through windows and the shadows engulfing his characters could stand to be a little less picture-picture manicured, just as the numerous parallels and echoes coursing throughout his tale might have benefited from being a tad more modest. Nonetheless, understatement isn’t part of the writer/director’s modus operandi here, and that’s ultimately to the benefit of his film, which proves to be a haunting portrait of the ways the world is made, defined, and contained within every individual person.
The Life of Chuck begins with Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a high-school teacher whose classroom is increasingly empty due to the fact that it appears to be the End Times. California is falling into the ocean, sinkholes are swallowing commuter cars in the middle of the street, and the internet is on the perpetual fritz. During parent-teacher conferences, moms and dads are less concerned with their kids’ performance and attendance than with their own inability to get online—and specifically, onto Pornhub, whose loss David Dastmalchian’s dad deems a “fucking tragedy.”
It’s all coming apart at the seams, and as Marty struggles with this dire state of affairs, so too does his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse at a hospital that’s so overwhelmed with the corpses of individuals who’ve taken their own lives that her unit is now known as the “suicide squad.”
Amidst this apocalyptic turn of events (which began, as Marty’s neighbor relays, only 14 months earlier), something even stranger is occurring: At a busy intersection, a billboard has appeared congratulating Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) on his retirement after 39 great years. By all appearances, Chuck is a middle-aged accountant, and it’s not long before this advertisement is additionally appearing on the radio and, even after the networks go dark, on television. As Marty learns, no one seems to know this mystery man; instead, the ads are merely one last inexplicable symptom of the universe’s impending collapse.
Flanagan scatters clues about the nature of this calamity throughout the initial act of The Life of Chuck before segueing to his second chapter, in which mild-mannered Chuck—nine months removed from his demise courtesy of brain cancer—walks past a drummer busking on the street and, without thinking about why, breaks into dance.
The crowd he attracts includes Lauren (Annalise Basso), a twentysomething who’s just been unceremoniously dumped by text and who’s so taken by Chuck’s performance that she joins him, wowing onlookers, Chuck, and herself in the process. The duo’s long-form routine is an exuberant expression of dreams and desires, and Hiddleston and Basso’s showmanship is infectious, providing the proceedings with a toe-tapping showstopper that conveys, wordlessly, the feelings at the heart of this saga.
In its final stanza, The Life of Chuck lays its card on the table by flashing back to Chuck’s childhood. In the wake of his parents’ untimely demise, middle-schooler Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) lives with his rock ‘n’ roll-loving grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara) and his accountant grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill), whose one inviolable rule is that the boy never enter their 19th-century Victorian house’s haunted cupola.
What lurks behind that chamber’s locked door looms large over young Chuck’s imagination. Concurrently, inspired by the movie musicals he watches with Sarah, Chuck becomes consumed with the school’s dance club, which eventually grants him an opportunity to seize a once-(or is it twice?)-in-a-lifetime opportunity for communion and happiness.
The Life of Chuck depicts reality as a realm where math and art, structure and chaos, and love and heartache are all intrinsically intertwined in ways that can be sensed if not completely parsed. Flanagan almost pushes King’s The Wizard of Oz-ish conceit to its breaking point, and Nick Offerman’s narration, adhering a bit too closely to the letter of the author’s prose, is occasionally a bit much.
Still, the writer/director captures his characters in empathetic three dimensions. Moreover, he wistfully celebrates the poetry of the little things that, in memory, become building blocks for who we are (and aspire to be), whether it’s the sight of a grandmother shaking her hips and wagging her finger in the air to a song on the radio while she cooks at the kitchen stove, or a night sky filled with so many stars upon stars upon stars that it illuminates everything below it.
Like its ambulatory protagonists, The Life of Chuck walks a fine line in search of poignancy, and despite stumbling every now and again, it quickly rights itself with earnest, affecting aplomb. At multiple stages, the film cites Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and its signature line, “I contain multitudes,” as a means of ruminating on the fact that everything we do, see, hear, create, and destroy happens between our two ears. If that’s so, however, the film simultaneously grasps—in a late scene in which young Chuck views a shooting star by himself, and then musters the courage to dance with a pretty eight-grader (Trinity Bliss) in front of his classmates—that it’s also better to share our unique world with others.
