Director/Screenplay – Mike Flanagan, Based on the Short Story The Life of Chuck (2020) by Stephen King, Producers – Mike Flanagan & Trevor Macy, Photography – Eben Bolter, Music – The Newton Brothers, Visual Effects – Engine Room Hollywood (Supervisor – Dan Schmit), Production Design – Steve Arnold, Choreography – Mandy Moore. Production Company – Intrepid Pictures/Red Room Pictures.
Cast
Tom Hiddleston (Charles “Chuck” Krantz), Jacob Tremblay (Charles “Chuck” Krantz), Benjamin Pajak (Charles “Chuck” Krantz), Cody Flanagan (Charles “Chuck” Krantz), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Marty Anderson), Karen Gillan (Felicia Gordon), Mark Hamill (Albie Krantz), Mia Sara (Sarah Krantz), Nick Offerman (Narrator), Samantha Sloyan (Miss Rohrbacher), The Pocket Queen (Taylor Franck), Carl Lumbly (Sam Yarborough), Annalise Basso (Janice Halliday), Matthew Lillard (Gus), Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (Cat McCoy), David Dastmalchian (Josh), Q’Orianka Kilcher (Virginia “Ginny” Krantz), Kate Siegel (Miss Richards), Heather Langenkamp (Vera Stanley), Violet McGraw (Iris), Rahul Kohli (Bri), Saidah Ekulona (Andrea), Michael Trucco (Dylan’s Dad), Harvey Guillen (Hector)
Plot
Act Three: Thanks, Chuck:- All around him, school teacher Marty Anderson sees the sudden collapse of society with the loss of the internet and massive environmental catastrophes. In the midst of this, he reconnects with his ex-wife Felicia Gordon. Marty also puzzles over the appearance of signs and billboards everywhere thanking Chuck Krantz on his upcoming retirement after thirty-nine years of good service. Act Two: Buskers Forever:- Chuck is attending a banking conference. In between sessions, he comes across Taylor Franck, who busks in the street with a drum set. He spontaneously begins dancing with passerby Janice Halliday, creating an appreciative crowd with their display. Act One: I Contain Multitudes:- As a child, Chuck is orphaned following the death of his parents but is taken in and raised by his paternal grandparents. He finds great pleasure at school by joining dance class, while his grandfather Albie urges that he study mathematics. Chuck also learns that his grandfather keeps a cupola at the top of the house padlocked and refuses all entry. Driven by his curiosity, Chuck determines to find what is inside.
Stephen King has been enjoying a major renaissance on screen ever since the big screen remake of It (2017). 2025 offers a bumper crop of King adaptations with The Life of Chuck going into wide release, as well as adaptations of The Long Walk (2025), The Monkey (2025), the remake of The Running Man (2025) and the tv series’ The Institute (2025- ) and the prequel series It: Welcome to Derry (2025- ) all coming out within the space of twelve months. (See below for a full list of Stephen King adaptations).
Mike Flanagan is a name that I have championed ever since I came across his fourth film Absentia (2011). From there, Flanagan went onto the likes of Oculus (2013), Hush (2016), Before I Wake (2016) and Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), most of these made for Blumhouse. He has had considerable breakout success in more recent years with various tv mini-series, often adapting classic horror stories with The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), The Midnight Club (2022) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). In between these, he has adapted several King works to film with Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019), while not long after the release of The Life of Chuck, he has announced a tv mini-series to be based on King’s first novel Carrie (1974).
The original King novella The Life of Chuck appears in If It Bleeds (2020), the same collection that also gave us Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022). Flanagan is exceptionally faithful to the original story – perhaps more so than any other King adaptation I can recall. He even has Nick Offerman as voiceover narrator quoting some of King’s dialogue direct. He follows the three-part, reverse chronology structure and keeps the characters the way that King had them.
Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck Krantz
The Life of Chuck has received some extraordinarily good reviews – it received the People’s Choice Award after its premiere at TIFF and top critic/audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes – and is having superlatives like “one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever” thrown at it. I am somewhat more muted in my praises. I suspect part of this is that the film taps the same wistful American childhood nostalgia and the sense of someone determining to keep going against great odds that turn up in all King adaptations that have crossed over into mainstream acclaim with the likes of Stand By Me (1986), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).
I found The Life of Chuck a bit of a head-scratcher. It has the most confusing, non-standard plot structure I have come across in a film in some time. It consists of three acts but each of these is told in reverse order – no problem with that, films have conducted that before, most memorably Memento (2000) and Irreversible (2002). On the other hand, it is not always clear how each of the acts is meant to connect – although this does become apparent as we get towards the end of the film. (To avoid confusion, I refer to each act as a section when referring to the order they appear in the film)
In the first section Thanks, Chuck, we follow schoolteacher Chiwetel Ejiofor as he appears in the midst of imminent
Social Collapses from multiple sources – the internet off, multiple environmental disasters, the appearance of sinkholes in the town, and then tv, phone and power going down, even the stars going out. All alongside the rise of the ubiquitous signs and tv commercials congratulating Chuck on his 39 years of great service. It is a fantastic hook for a set-up that leaves you wondering what the heck is going on and what the underlying explanation for everything is.
Tom Hiddleston and Annalise Basso dance in the street
This sense of trying to work out what is going on continues into the next segment Buskers Forever. There seems no connection to the previous segment other than the character of Chuck, who had previously appeared on the billboards and ads in the first section who we now meet in person with Tom Hiddleston. This act consists of a single scene where Hiddleston on inspiration gets up and dances in the street as a drummer (The Pocket Queen) plays a beat, spontaneously getting Annalise Basso to join him in a virtuoso display. (The amusement in the sequence is how the dance sequence, although apparently spur-of-the-moment, is one that requires two people who never previously knew one another to act in a highly choreographed way. I also wrote an article on street buskers some years back and The Pocket Queen’s method – having a manager, receiving hundreds of dollars in profit in a single day so much so that she can just give it away – is improbable to say the least). The connection between this and the first section is puzzling – all that we have is the central character of Tom Hiddleston’s Chuck and it is a puzzle how he fits into this story. We are now just short of an hour into the story without any real idea why things are happening.
The third section I Contain Multitudes is the story of Chuck’s childhood where he is played by three different actors (including Flanagan’s son Cody) at different ages, which occurs so seamlessly that you don’t realise it is not the same actor. This has more great dancing displays – especially one that takes place at a disco. (A passion for dancing is the oddest thing to see in either a Mike Flanagan or a Stephen King adaptation – not something you expect from either). This section also introduces the secrets of the attic held by Mark Hamill (almost unrecognisable but giving a great performance). What the secret is is kept from us until the very end, although is not that hard to piece together from the clues littered throughout.
[PLOT SPOILERS] In the final section, the film’s two big mysteries – what was going on in the first act and what is in the attic – are answered. What is happening in the first section is given by this act’s title I Contain Multitudes and Kate Siegel’s teacher’s explanation to the young Chuck about all the characters and people he contains in his head. From this we conclude that the characters in the first section are people that Chuck has encountered throughout his life. We see various of these throughout the other episodes – Chiwetel Ejiofor’s teacher, Carl Lumbly talking about wanting to be a weatherman, the girl on skates, the analogy of the history of the universe in the space of one year tying back to Carl Sagan on Cosmos (1980) – who all seem to exist and carry on a separate life of their own. Presumably they are doing so in Chuck’s head and the collapse of society and end of the world we see is Chuck expiring in his last moments. It is a gimmicky idea – not dissimilar to Will Ferrell’s realisation he is a fictional character in Stranger Than Fiction (2006) – that to me doesn’t quite work. For one, you would expect the characters that exist in someone’s mind to be based on the interactions Chuck has had with the people in his life but not for them to have independent lives, including marriages and divorces and interactions with other people Chuck has never met or has no awareness. It’s the way a writer constructs characters in their head as people with backstories, but not the way the average person remembers those they know.
Mark Hamill as Chuck’s grandfather Albie
[PLOT SPOILERS CONTINUE] The second twist comes in the very final scene of the third section where we find out what it is that Mark Hamill was guarding in the cupola of the house – namely, that it is an empty room but that it grants visions of the deaths of those that the person knows, including their own. It ends up being kind of a weak ending for the film with the teenage Chuck just standing there contemplating his dying future self in a hospital bed. It almost feels here that The Life of Chuck is a bait-and-switch film. It starts off with a big hook of characters discovering the world collapsing but what we end up with is nothing to do with that but about a man receiving a premonition of his own death.
Put it this way – the elements of the first section with Chiwetel Ejiofor are irrelevant to the end revelation and what happens in either Act 2 or 1. More than anything, The Life of Chuck feels as though Stephen King had ideas for two different stories that weren’t enough to be a full story on its own and jammed them together. The finished story has the feel of a Frankenstein patchwork creation that is awkwardly structured and feels like it is telling two-and-a-bit different stories that are only connected because King wants them to be.
Mike Flanagan’s name has risen such that he is able to command an extraordinary cast – even small roles with a couple of lines of dialogue are filled with actors like Harvey Guillen and Violet McGraw from M3gan (2022). (David Dastmalchian has an hilarious scene-stealing scene at the start as a parent mourning the end of Pornhub). As always, Flanagan prefers to cast an ensemble of familiar faces who recur throughout his works – Kate Siegel (Mrs Flanagan), Mark Hamill, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli, Karen Gillan, Heather Langenkamp, Carl Lumbly, Michael Trucco. In addition, Flanagan likes to bring out of mothballs actors with long genre histories – Hamill, Langenkamp the lead from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Mia Sara from Legend (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) (who Flanagan apparently persuaded to return after an eleven year absence from screens), and Q’Orianka Kilcher, Pocahontas to Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).
