This review contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck. Proceed accordingly!
Writer Stephen King and director Mike Flanagan have once again worked their magic to create an emotional film that connects with audiences and critics alike. The Life of Chuck, based on King's novella featured in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds, finally got its highly-anticipated wide release last weekend after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. Their third collaboration, this film proves that King and Flanagan aren't just horror masters, but that they can also offer honest, heartfelt stories of life and love.
The pair first teamed in 2017 on an adaptation of King's acclaimed 1992 novel Gerald's Game, a story previously regarded as "unfilmable." The result was a huge success critically and with fans, launching a long and successful partnership between the two. They worked together again on 2019's Doctor Sleep, adapting King's popular sequel to The Shining, where Flanagan met the nearly-impossible task of following Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece adaptation. He pulled it off, the film was a hit, and he and King were further established as a contemporary horror dream team.
Flanagan loves to tell a story with flashbacks and multiple timelines, as we’ve seen through his adaptations of classic literature like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, and several Poe works in The Fall of the House of Usher, all adapted into series for Netflix. For Life of Chuck, the story is told in reverse, beginning with the third and final act, where viewers are introduced to the end of the world.
Marty, played effortlessly by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a high school teacher trying to maintain balance throughout the failure of the internet, phone lines, and eventually, electricity, all the while hounded by billboards and TV ads thanking the mysterious Chuck Krantz for a “great 39 years." By the end of the film, we realize that this act and its characters aren’t quite what they seem, and are instead projected fragments of Chuck’s life from his disintegrating consciousness. The end of the world is actually his impending death from a brain tumor at age 39.
Act 2 introduces us to Chuck Krantz before cancer, a hopeful accountant who was raised by his grandparents after the death of his parents in a car accident. Taught to dance in childhood by his musical-loving grandmother (played by Ferris Bueller-dream-girl Mia Sara), Chuck is now a middle aged husband and father. The bulk of the act features Hiddleston's Chuck dancing on the street with a stranger to a beat by a busking drummer, who then questions the fate of their meeting. While Tom Hiddleston's dancing is incredibly impressive and reportedly took six weeks to learn, this is the weakest act, feeling a little slow and small compared to the other, more sweeping bookends.
The first act, shown last in the film, is the most compelling and the heart of the story. We see young Chuck growing up as he learns how to dance and how to live. Director's son Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and frequent-Flanagan-collaborator Jacob Tremblay shine as young versions of Chuck as he comes of age and deals with the struggles of childhood and adolescence.
This act also features a compelling subplot involving a locked room in the house Chuck is forbidden from entering by his grandfather. In a classic Stephen King twist, Chuck's alcoholic grandpa (Hamill) can see the future deaths of everyone in his life when he goes into the room. Another highlight involves a funeral home director explaining his theory of a "weatherman's stare," which can't help but conjure King's previous works and definition of "the shine." It's a great callback for fans of King's universe.
Woven throughout the film is the poem “Song of Myself” from Walt Whitman’s seminal Leaves of Grass, particularly the lines “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The heartfelt assertion of the story is captured in these lines, that a person is made up of every thought inside their head and everyone that they meet, encounter, and imagine. A person's life is made up of small moments, like stars in a galaxy, that add up to big experiences, shared feelings, and the experience of belonging. It's further echoed by repeated references to Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the universe.
The film also features some stellar performances from Tom Hiddleston, Sara, Ejiofor, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, plus a minor but memorable appearance by Matthew Lillard. Perhaps the best feature is Flanagan's wife and frequent collaborator, Kate Siegel, as Chuck's sixth grade teacher who explains Whitman and ultimately inspires him with its meaning. Pajak also steals the show as 11-year-old Chuck on a quest to become the best dancer in his middle school.
The film comes together at the end, as the viewers realize how the acts tie together to represent Chuck's life. Flanagan has a clear, distinct style that works well with King's world, and he's proven once again that his depth for filmmaking goes beyond chills and thrills to the heart of what it means to be human.
The Life of Chuck is a powerful take on a horror master's more sensitive side, likely to go down in history alongside King's other dramatic adaptations like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. At its core, Life of Chuck explores what it means to be a person and what it is that makes being human wonderful. It’s sentimental, sad, sometimes challenging, a little scary, and often hopeful—a lot like life.
Flanagan currently owns the television rights to King's epic series The Dark Tower, so fans of the duo can look forward to more collaboration in the future.