It comes as no surprise that reigning scare-meister Mike Flanagan has a soft spot for Stephen King, having successfully adapted Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep for the big screen. But his latest stab at King, the genre-warping The Life of Chuck , makes for an oddball if less ideal fit.
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A hopeful take on the end of days, unfolding in reverse chronological order, the quirky novella appeared in King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds . Flanagan, who had been sent an advance copy at the onset of the COVID lockdown, was deeply moved by the underlying message of learning to hold onto precious moments in the face of adversity.
But although the resulting feature, which held its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival with the author in attendance, delivers the uplifting goods, it does so at the cost of an initially darkly intriguing premise that grows more diluted and precarious as it moves along — or, backward in this case. The end result offers up such unexpected developments as a dancing Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill as a Jewish zayde (grandpa), Flanagan’s rabid fan base might prefer to wait for his planned take on The Exorcist franchise.
The existential third act, which sets up the film, finds the world in a dystopian quagmire of natural and man-made catastrophes — among them a devastating 9.1 magnitude California quake resulting in the state “peeling away like old wallpaper,” Ohio wildfires, widespread flooding in Europe and a volcano in Germany, not to mention a wobbly Internet that’s threatening to disappear permanently at any given moment.
Coping as best they can with the rapidly impending doom are a stoic schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife, an exhausted nurse (Karen Gillan). The couple are also trying to make sense of all the mysterious “Thanks Chuck!” billboards, signs and TV ads popping up everywhere showing the mild-mannered face of one Charles Krantz (Hiddleston), congratulating him on 39 great years.
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Flanagan establishes an effective dread-cloaked eeriness here, combined with a touch of satire that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wes Anderson production, setting the stage for a well-earned gasp of an act-closer. Shifting back in time, the second act reveals the mysterious Chuck Krantz to be a bank employee, who, in the words of narrator Nick Offerman, “is dressed in the armor of accounting” but who makes like Christopher Walken in the iconic “Weapon of Choice” video and breaks into a heavily-choreographed dance sequence with passer-by Annalise Basso to the propulsive drumbeats of a busker (The Pocket Queen).
With a game Hiddleston giving it his all, the sequence, however seemingly out of place, can’t help but captivate.
Then, alas, we move onto the much longer first act, which presents Krantz’s backstory in a decidedly Spielbergian framework: He was raised as a young man (Jacob Tremblay) by his grandparents (Mia Sara and Hamill, doing his best Richard Dreyfuss), discovering his love of dance and determined to find out why there’s a padlock on the door to their Victorian home’s cupola.
It’s by every measure the weakest of the three acts; the more that is revealed the less remains that makes the rest special. Flanagan, as demonstrated in his Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass , excels in creating an unsettling mood and atmosphere that bridges each episode. Here, lacking in tonal connective tissue, The Life of Chuck may still leave in its wake the desired upbeat, life-hugging effect, but it ultimately proves to be an ephemeral one — as transitory as the apparitions who usually haunt Flanagan’s more potent ghost stories.
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