Don’t Be Surprised If The Life of Chuck Breaks You

Based on a short story by Stephen King, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck begins as a disaster movie, though not the kind one might expect from a guy like King. Early on, we hear news of a magnitude 9.1 earthquake splintering off a huge chunk of California into the Pacific, just the latest in a series of worldwide calamities. But amid the worries about bridge collapses and floods and species extinction and famine, a teacher named Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) primarily spends his time trying to calm his students and their parents about the fact that the internet is down. “The library’s still here,” he tells them with a playfully snide matter-of-factness that wins us over to his side.

This isn’t thriller territory; it’s frog-in-boiling-water territory. People go about their days walking for hours to get to work because a giant sinkhole has paralyzed traffic and making small talk about inundated Japanese reactors and volcanos exploding in Germany. Marty’s ex-wife, Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), is a nurse at a hospital where the doctors have fled and they’re getting six suicide victims a day. “She feels more like an undertaker,” Nick Offerman’s solemn narration informs us. Anybody with sense memories of real-life disasters — from 9/11 to the COVID pandemic — will recognize the human need to normalize despair and catastrophe, as will those who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about climate collapse.

So this is a fictional but familiar apocalypse. And then, it isn’t. As Marty and Felicia reconnect amid the chaos, they both notice a series of strange ads — billboards, radio ads, banners — celebrating a man named Chuck Krantz’s 39 great years at a midwestern bank. Nobody knows who Chuck Krantz is, but people seem happy that at least somebody’s having a good day. And the ads are multiplying: They show up on TV, even though there’s no more TV. That’s when we begin to realize that what we’re watching is not what we think we’re watching.

Flanagan has already proven his thriller bona fides with previous King adaptations like Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, and he is ruthlessly faithful to his source material here. But The Life of Chuck, it turns out, isn’t one of King’s works of suspense. Rather, it swims in that same “get busy living … or get busy dying” carpe diem current as another classic King adaptation, Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. Its genre elements have been sublimated into an unabashedly emotional and unexpectedly twisty story about endurance and living life to the fullest. The director and his cast manage an almost impossible high-wire act of conveying the urgency or the wonder of a given moment, even as we sense that there’s a grander, perhaps more metaphorical design at work. It would have been easy for Ejiofor’s and Gillan’s characters to totally freak out, and it also would have been easy for them to play things with total detachment. Instead, they find that vital middle ground of slow-burning expectation and dread that makes us think, Yep, that’s how it would be. That’s exactly how it would happen for us, too.

That opening-apocalypse chapter is presented as Act III of a narrative triptych that’s moving backward and which now jumps to Chuck himself (Tom Hiddleston), a middle-aged and largely undistinguished accountant in town for a conference. We meet him on a bright day as he finds himself unexpectedly dancing on a street corner to the accompaniment of a local busker (Taylor Gordon). Chuck invites a woman from the crowd to join him — Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso), whom the narrator has just informed us has undergone a bad breakup via text message — and their marvelous dance sequence offers a startling contrast to the grim despair of the film’s first (third?) act. A moment of fleeting beauty to counter the surreal destruction of humanity. Seriously, where is this movie going?

It would spoil things to say too much more, but the final section, which takes place during Chuck’s childhood, introduces more complications than might be apparent at first glance. This is a story about learning to appreciate life, but it also presents us with a compellingly slippery idea of what life actually is. The film’s driving ideas, which transform over the course of the picture, are replete with ironic potential, but Flanagan ably navigates the tonal minefield, never presenting the whole thing as a wink-wink joke on his characters. They feel real, both in their conception and in how they deviate from our preconceptions, which is quite an accomplishment given that most of them aren’t even onscreen for that long within the movie’s frescolike structure. The film delicately glances past all these lives. Our tears catch us by surprise.