The Cosmic Intimacy of ‘The Life of Chuck’

Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation may be his strongest film yet

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For those familiar with Stephen King or Mike Flanagan, simply seeing their names attached to a movie is probably enough to pique curiosity. For fans of both, The Life of Chuck may feel like an overdue collision of the two creators’ unique talents. It stands in the center of the Venn diagram between King’s flair for human-centered storytelling and Flanagan’s affinity for mining existential depth from unexpected sources.

For King aficionados, it’s a thrill whenever his non-horror entries make their way to the big screen. From Stand By Me and Misery to The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, it’s often forgotten that many of the greatest adaptations of his work fall almost completely outside of the realm of ghosts and apparitions. But it’s The Life of Chuck that may stand as the proudest exhibit yet of the prolific storyteller’s ability to tap into something more.

Character-focused tales afford King freer rein to examine life and humanity. Within the horror genre, deeper themes have a tendency to be flattened or replaced by jump scares, gore, and shock value. So often, a narrative’s impact lies in raw terror rather than emotional resonance.

As one of the directors to routinely push boundaries within the horror genre, it’s only right that Mike Flanagan would be the one tasked with bringing Stephen King’s tender 2020 novella to life. Having adapted King’s writing in the past, Flanagan is also one of the few directors who’s earned the famed author’s seal of approval. (Even Stanley Kubrick notoriously drew King’s ire for his reimagining of The Shining.)

During Flanagan’s time writing and directing the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher, he’s managed to toe the line between philosophical profundity and fear. The director uses our closeness to death as a conduit to offer human insight. Watching him now channel that same strategy toward a narrative that celebrates life instead of dramatizing death is a change of pace that’s as affectionate as it is luminous.

It’s a recurrent theme with many of my favorite stories and films that they render summary into an all but pointless task. The more I try to communicate the plot, the more I’m reminded just how much of art’s effect is wordless at its core.

It isn’t all movies that refuse to be reduced to blurbs. I’d even say that a majority of films and TV shows are fairly serviced by their synopses.

Taken is about a retired spy who goes to painstaking lengths to save his kidnapped daughter. The Ring is a horror movie about a journalist investigating a cursed videotape that kills anyone who watches it within a week, and 50 First Dates is the comedic tale of a man romantically pursuing a woman with short term memory loss.

Reading a summary isn’t the same thing as watching the movie, but oftentimes, it can at least give people a reasonable idea of what to expect walking in. Of course, to be describable isn’t to be artless.

Yet it’s hard to argue that White House Down, John Wick, or Top Gun are films that lend themselves to very meaningful abstraction. They’re flashy, bombastic, and unlikely to stoke serious questions or introspection. The art on display is of a much more surface level variety. The conversations they provoke are less profound.

Then there are movies that are so uncontainable that they refuse to be put in boxes and spur feverish debates among viewers before they’ve even left theaters. A few films that fall into this category for me are Everything Everywhere All at Once, Life of Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Magnolia, Soul, Interstellar, and most recently, The Life of Chuck. They’re best approached by audiences without prior trailers or preconceptions. They also mark occasions when addressing entertainment rises to something philosophical. Merely outlining what occurs within their plots has an unfortunate way of reducing them.

As with the great paintings of history, a film can rise above the sum of its parts. Knowing what’s contained on the canvas isn’t the same as feeling it. There’s no Sparknotes that conveys “A Starry Night” or “Mona Lisa.”

Yet retelling what happens in a story has never been my favorite part of covering entertainment. When the conversation is more centered around the they stir, the terrain feels not only the most enjoyable, but the most important.

The Life of Chuck sits in this domain for me. There are few films I’ve watched that exhibit such raw understanding of what it’s like to be alive on Earth during this fraught century, nor that capture the aching variety of all the directions life can take. In some regards, the two themes feel at odds with one another. It’s at once cosmically grand and soul-baringly intimate. It uses the personal to explore the universal, but in a cleverly veiled way.

As with The Sixth Sense, it’s a movie whose twists would be an injustice to spoil for others. But because it’s the conclusion where everything comes together, it makes the task of reviewing and relaying The Life of Chuck especially difficult. I feel forced to walk around one of the features that makes the story most interesting.

Making the task all the more unwieldy is the movie’s reverse chronological structure. Beginning with Act III before delicately working its way back to Act I, viewers are catapulted into a world that’s falling apart at the seams while people wander around, aimless and despondent.

We learn that Chuck, portrayed by Tom Hiddleston, is an important figure to the end of the world — but can’t figure out why. Billboards thank him for a life well-lived and TVs that no longer broadcast shows, news, or movies display nothing but his cryptic, smiling face. One character remarks that he’s “the last meme of the apocalypse.” Yet no one knows who he is.

Viewers spend the rest of the movie piecing together why this insignificant man hovers over the end times like a monolith. As the connections are made and we learn who Chuck is — why he’s so integral to the fate of the world — audiences are likely to fall into two camps:

There are those who will find the movie too nebulous for its own good. As with Don’t Look Up, it’s either loved or hated but leaves little room for in-between. Viewers will find it pretentious or prophetic. Masterful or top-heavy. Cosmically grand or unapologetically self-inflated.

Even while I find this latest Flanagan film to be his best yet, I can’t help but acknowledge the criticisms. There’s a specificity to the final act (the first act, structurally) that doesn’t fully mesh with the broad strokes of the film’s true ending.

The movie starts with a cast of characters that are so vivid and well realized that their interactions seem bound to pay off in some conclusion that pulls all of the disparate puzzle pieces together. But their specific plots vanish without direct payoff. The opening feels almost like part of a different movie than where it ultimately ends. As it moves backwards through time and a crumbling world coheres, I found myself yearning for more of an exploration of King’s eerie, end of Earth scenario. (Maybe I just have a weakness for disaster movies.)

As The Life of Chuck’s most grandiose themes begin to unfurl, the film’s scope also narrows. It’s a strange contradiction. It hones in on the individual rather than the species and loses some of its scale in the process. But I think the paradox is much of the point: we’re all connected. Individuals are parts of a larger whole.

Some find fault in the movie’s failure to conclude neatly. But life is complicated, and there’s no sweeping metaphor or allegory that ties it all together. As with Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Life of Chuck invites viewers to revel in the messiness. It wants us to reflect on the ways that we flit in and out of one another’s lives, and on the tiny moments and memories that ripple across the boundless expanse in all of us.