'The Life of Chuck' review: Mike Flanagan and Stephen King team up for career-best cinema
The Life of Chuck is a perfect marriage of Mike Flanagan and Stephen King's talents, but not in the way you might expect.
Both are living legends of horror, with the former creating a bevy of absolutely haunting miniseries for Netflix, including The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher, while the latter is a prolific, best-selling author whose horrific work has spawned such iconic scary movies as The Shining, It, and Carrie. This is Flanagan's third King adaptation, having tackled the kinky and nightmarish Gerald's Game for Netflix in 2017 and The Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. Despite their shared taste for the scary stuff, their latest collaboration has much more in common with mainstream King adaptations like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption than any of the above gems.
The star-studded cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston, Matthew Lillard, and David Dastmalchian as well as previous Flanagan collaborators like Karen Gillan (Oculus), Mark Hamill (Fall of the House of Usher), Rahul Kohli (Midnight Mass), Samantha Sloyan (Fall of the House of Usher), Jacob Tremblay (Doctor Sleep), and Kate Siegel (Hush). This dazzling ensemble tells a profound yet joyous tale of life and death, but not to worry — there's a bit of spooky stuff in here too.
What's The Life of Chuck about?
For those who haven't read King's novella, this movie's story is a mystery for much of its runtime. That's a thrill so rare I won't be ruining the fun with spoilers. So, let's say this: The Life of Chuck begins in a world plagued by catastrophe. Earthquakes are sloshing off chunks of California into the Pacific. Rampant absenteeism has shattered the reliability of society. And the internet is down, even PornHub.
Incredibly, Flanagan's adapted screenplay paints a world that feels both terrifyingly familiar to our own, yet also speckled with humor. For instance, Dastmalchian, a character actor who is a gift to the horror genre, pops up to deliver a heart-breaking monologue that's gently studded with a great, humane punchline. The witness to these waves of pain and resilient pleasure is Marty Anderson (Ejiofor), a grade-school teacher who is desperately trying to make sense of this new (lack of) order, but is distracted by the widespread advertisement that is the movie's central mystery.
Charles "Chuck" Krantz (Hiddleston) stares out from billboards and TV commercials, a thin smile on his face. Next to him is a chipper message thanking this seeming pencil-pusher for 39 great years. It seems to be a retirement ad. But why, as the stars themselves begin to flicker out of existence, does Chuck's face appear in suburban windows in a terrible green glow? Flanagan won't answer this swiftly. Instead, he'll unfurl the life of this mysterious ad man in the two following acts. And in this, he and King explore grief with a defiant joy.
The Life of Chuck is about life in the face of death.
In the film's opening act, Ejiofor and a cast of characters, including Gillan as his ex-wife, seek meaning and solace in a world ravaged by loss. There's a grim but beautiful sense of community in this shared agony. The latter acts look to the moments before such loss — the day you had a fateful meeting with a stranger; a school dance that changed your heart forever; the childhood curiosity whose impact wouldn't fully hit 'til years later.
It's a foolhardy endeavor to try to capture a whole life in one movie; look to so many dull and stodgy biopics as evidence. And yet Flanagan manages it by creating a throughline in these moments of meaning. What were the moments that made Chuck's 39 years great? A thread that leads, in one direction, to the end of the world is followed back to a beguiling dance number, in which Hiddleston wows with a buoyant showmanship. This follows back to a childhood tragedy that connects to a moment of grandmotherly bonding, to an after-school activity, and the kind of epic defining moment of hard-won self-assurance that glows bright even decades later.
Where some films struggle to slip through time to gesture to a complete story (We Live in Time), The Life of Chuck is elegant in its dance from now to then and way back when. The story is rife with tragedy, including natural disasters, death, and even social anxiety. But it's balanced by the undeniable beauty of unexpected human connections through art and conversation. It's a story that weaves about in such an unconventional way that Flanagan demands the audience's trust and patience. But the payoff is wondrous, delivering the kind of soul-emboldening emotional catharsis of King's most heart-felt films, like Stand By Me, The Green Mile, and The Shawshank Redemption. Undoubtedly, The Life of Chuck is not just one of Flanagan's best films yet, but also one of the best adaptations of King's work as well.
The cast of The Life of Chuck is beyond radiant.
Ejiofor shoulders the first act with eyes alive with curiosity, hope, and fear. Gillan brings a self-assured grit that grounds this dying world. With a gruff voice and a haunted tone, Hamill plays a grandfather instantly familiar as he is both loving and lost. Dastmalchian, Lillard, and Siegel deliver brief but stirring monologues that hit to the core. Sloyan, who was chilly in Usher, is divinely warm here as a grade-school gym teacher. Hiddleston shines as a common man with an extraordinary life, while Cody Flanagan and Jacob Tremblay do a superb job of playing Chuck's younger selves, mimicking Hiddleston's physicality while carving out their own magical moments.
It's incredible. This is a movie that contains so much that it just shouldn't work. It's easy to imagine an iteration that fell too hard into the darkness, or depended too intensely on treacly sentimentality, or relied on its dashing star power to gloss over some underwritten turns. But The Life of Chuck is masterfully told. Like King's most moving adaptations, it doesn't play by standard rules of structure or audience expectations. It demands we follow the winding road through playful dialogue, painful lows, and rollicking highs, to an unknown beyond. It's surprising and upsetting, funny and profound. I laughed hard, cried 'til my eyes ached, and once gasped so loud that I heard it echo across a theater struck silent by a moment both shocking and tender.
As I write this, The Life of Chuck has no distributor, meaning we don't know if or when it might come to a theater near you. But following a rousing world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, which I attended, this awesome adaptation won the People's Choice Award. While it seems certain it will be bought, here's hoping that acquisition will lead to a theatrical release. There are some movies that really deserve to be seen in a big theater, surrounded by people — a community – tied to each other in the heady experience of cinematic art, and The Life of Chuck is one of them. It is glorious.
The Life of Chuck was reviewed out of the world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.