Mike Flanagan has spent the last decade convincing us that there might be something terrifying lurking in the shadows. The Life of Chuck is his fourth Stephen King adaptation. But with this one, he turns the lights on and shows us something scarier and sweeter. What he shows us is that the finite clock of an ordinary life can contain an entire universe.
The Life of Chuck carries with it the weight of expectation and the promise of a dancing Tom Hiddleston, and somehow it works. This is a story told backwards and sideways. Flanagan keeps King’s tricky structure intact, telling Chuck Krantz’s existence in three acts that run in reverse.
Act III drops us into the dying embers of civilization. The internet has gone out, the California coast slides into the Pacific, and billboards everywhere thank a stranger named Chuck for “39 great years.”
First we get an intimate look at exes Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Felicia (Karen Gillan) as they cling to each other for humanity’s last moments, while the cosmos seemingly falls apart alongside a middle-aged accountant (Hiddleston) dying of a brain tumor. It’s an unsettling yet oddly calm apocalypse.
Act II rewinds nine months to a Boston street where a healthy Chuck hears the beat of a street drummer who is actually the real-life drumming phenom Taylor Gordon. What begins as a polite dance erupts into a full Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire dance party. The segment plays like a wistful, goofy, and radiant short film.
Act I then slips further back to Chuck’s Alabama childhood, where grandparents played by Mark Hamill and Mia Sara teach him math, and the unnerving secret of the house’s cupola where past, present, and future blur together. After the death of his grandparents, young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) looks in and sees…well, to reveal more would rob you of the payoff. Flanagan trusts viewers to piece together the puzzle, and the emotional take is enormous.
For a filmmaker known for horror, Flanagan shows remarkable restraint. The tension here isn’t a ghoulish reveal but the creeping dread of dwindling time. Long takes linger on empty hallways; static billboards loom like cosmic obituaries. Cinematographer Eben Bolter, Flanagan’s partner on Midnight Mass, soaks set pieces in sickly sodium light to portray a dying world, then changes to lush golden warmth for the dance sequence, mirroring the film’s valleys of despair and peaks of joy. Still, some of Flanagan’s old habits creep into the film. A Nick Offerman voice-over pipes up whenever the plot threatens to get cloudy, sometimes underlining themes the images already convey. Yet the director’s editing retains a musical logic, letting scenes exhale before snapping to black.
Tom Hiddleston carries the film on shoulders already seasoned by Loki’s cosmic burdens. Here, he dials back the mischief and leans into vulnerability, giving Chuck a subdued, “aw-shucks” charm that makes his inevitable demise sting. In just one extended dance sequence, he cycles through bashful dad moves, Broadway kicks, and a sudden bout of dizzy disorientation. It’s a microcosm of a life’s highs and lows.
Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor, reunited after Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, ground the abstract premise in real humanity. Their gentle ribbing during the apocalypse plays like two divorced friends discovering they’re each other’s final text thread. Meanwhile, Mia Sara’s as Chuck’s bubbling grandmother is a small miracle. Her steady, conspiratorial grin suggests she’s been keeping secrets for decades.
Mark Hamill, all weathered and sorrowed on bourbon, nearly steals the show as Grandpa Albie. He’s a man who stuffs grief into spreadsheets and whiskey bottles. Child actor Benjamin Pajak (Broadway’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) nails Chuck’s blend of curiosity and slow existential terror, ensuring the opening and closing images come together with devastating clarity.
King labeled Chuck’s life “a universe unto itself,” and the film takes that line literally. Every billboard, drumbeat, and spiral staircase becomes a star in the personal galaxy flickering inside Chuck’s skull. The movie invites a chatty post-credits debate: Are we watching actual cosmic disintegration, or is it Chuck’s brain firing its last firework? Either way, that vagueness is the point.
Flanagan paints the film with shades of It’s a Wonderful Life but avoids turning the script into a quote fest. Instead, he stages small, revelatory choices, like when a character decides to drive across town when cell signals go out or to dance with a stranger on a lunch break; it’s these small moments that argue the point that such choices shape worlds. Instead of King’s measured infallibility about the human condition that The Mist so expertly portrayed, The Life of Chuck plays more like “What if humanity was rational during a crisis?”
Not every gear meshes perfectly, though. The apocalypse prologue leans on news montages that border on cliché, and Offerman’s narration occasionally feels like training wheels for viewers. Flanagan doesn’t actually need to hold the audience’s hand. Yet even at its most precious, The Life of Chuck never slides into cheap sentiment. The film earns the audience’s emotional reaction by anchoring scenes in specificity, like the scar on Chuck’s hand that lets older and younger selves recognize each other or the repeated drum riff that morphs from a street beat to a hospice heartbeat.
The Life of Chuck stands alongside Doctor Sleep as proof that Flanagan’s translation of King’s softer works can sing just as loudly as his screams. It’s a love letter to the infinitesimal miracles of living, where dancing to street drummers’ beats, first kisses, and awkward math lessons are the building blocks of a lived life. And a reminder that each ending rewinds into someone else’s beginning. If Oppenheimer wrestled with how we might end the world, The Life of Chuck wonders how many worlds vanish every time a single person exhales for the last time.
Clocking in at a quick 111 minutes, The Life of Chuck practically demands multiple viewings. Whether you see it as sci-fi or a deep interior coming-of-age story, The Life of Chuck reminds us that even the smallest life can leave footprints large enough to shake the stars.
Screen Rated 