The Life Of Chuck

Like Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont, Mike Flanagan has made Stephen King adaptations a speciality. But while Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep felt no less ripe for cinematic treatment than, say, Misery or Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption, King’s 2020 novella The Life Of Chuck seems a peculiar choice. Hardly a genre banger, it is the story of an average man’s life told in reverse. And rather than plucking at one strand or refitting the material entirely, Flanagan has boldly gone for a faithful take. Like the novella, he’s even divided his film into three chapters, thereby risking the dangers of the anthology movie.

It opens strongly with a curious apocalypse tale. But there are no storm clouds or explosions in this Armageddon. Just sunny skies and quiet streets, with people reflecting on their existential predicament. Disasters are reported (from Pornhub going down to a volcano in Germany) though not witnessed, making it feel affectingly relatable — but for the metaphysical quirk that has billboards, TV ads and sky-writing celebrating “39 great years” of some guy named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). Fronted by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan, this is the best-performed segment. There’s a good chance you’ll be weeping before the first half-hour is done.

The Life Of Chuck is destined to divide people. But that feels key to its appeal.

The middle chapter is powerful in a very different way. Bringing Hiddleston to the fore, it presents Chuck himself. This suit-and-tied accountant rekindles his inner dancer after being seized by the rhythm of a busking drummer (Taylor Gordon, aka viral drummer The Pocket Queen), and with Hiddles busting some truly impressive moves, we receive a heady dose of pure, unfiltered joy. We’re used to seeing terrible things happen to people in Flanagan’s work; here we couldn’t be further up the other end of the scale.

The final part concerns Chuck as a child, wrestling with his love of dance and his grandfather’s (Mark Hamill) expectations that he goes into finance, while curious about the supposedly haunted cupola in their home. Sadly, as in the source material, this segment lacks the tonal clarity of the previous two, and so isn’t quite the rousing crescendo one might hope for.

The Life Of Chuck is destined to divide people. There’s little chance you’ll walk out with the same opinion as everyone else you saw it with. But that feels key to its appeal. This movie’s doing something unexpected, something that, frankly, not everyone’s gonna dig, with all its genre-hopping, narrative idiosyncrasy, and insistence on quoting Walt Whitman. It’s trying to say something about, well, life, and its intrinsic value, without winking or glibness or worrying about being ‘cool’. In short, it’s effectively a movie that’s happy to dance like nobody’s watching.