The Life of Chuck Review: Stephen King and Mike Flanagan Were Made for Each Other

People who call Stephen King a horror writer get him all wrong. There are horrible, terrifying things that happen in his stories, sure. Most of them, anyway. But no matter how ghoulish, how gruelling things become in splashes of pig’s blood, or flashes of clown’s makeup, those macabre charms are fleeting. They’re interstitial selling points in stories crafted by a consummate, and sometimes saccharine, humanist.

A few filmmakers have picked up on this over the years, although not nearly as many as those who skim right past King’s warmth in a rush to gawk at the shadows. And then there’s Mike Flanagan, a fellow sentimentalist who happens to love painting his fireside tableaus with various shades of charcoal. Like King, Flanagan has made a career in the genre space of the sick and sinister, but only insofar as to set up his next affirmation of the light. This includes a number of superb reimaginings of Gothic masters on Netflix—Shirley Jackson, Henry James, and Edgar Allan Poe—as well as probably the best Stephen King adaptations made in this century: Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and Midnight Mass, which is Salem’s Lot by another name. So it’s perhaps no surprise at all that when it came time to return to the big screen after half a decade in the Netflix trenches, Flanagan decided to forego horror affectations altogether—but not King.

His new movie The Life of Chuck is still a King adaptation, in this case pulling from a short story the author published in 2020 about a seemingly innocuous, middle-aged ant with a light twinkle in his toes, and a sadder one in his eyes. But despite dealing with subject matters that intersect with calamity, tragedy, and even the occasional ghost, The Life of Chuck is never meant to scare or distress. It is instead the apotheosis of these two creative’s connections, confirming just how much a pair of big softies they are at heart. And you know what, that probably includes me as well.

As elegiac as Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile, nostalgic like Stand By Me, and more overstuffed with mid-20th century rock’n roll than Christine, The Life of Chuck is the epitome of the empathy at the heart of King’s work that keeps fans coming back, and his bitterest critics recoiled. As several characters state plainly in the script, this film is a manifestation of Walt Whitman’s assertion that we have the capacity to contain multitudes. Such galaxy-brained aspirations will disgust those allergic to sentimentality, but as mild-mannered Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) proves throughout the story, we have the choice to not live the life of a malcontent. We can even find wonder in the beat of a drumming busker on a summer day.

This euphoric sequence, for the record, is where we properly meet Hiddleston’s Chuck during the movie’s second act. But by design, the film is told out of order, beginning in what appears to be an apocalyptic and ecological end times labeled by a title card as “Act Three.” As we soon learn, this inexplicable planet-wide disaster began the day the internet went out around the world (which honestly sounds utopian to me). The mystery of what could cause such a phenomenon, as well as the more ominous symptoms that follow, is the story’s hook. But it’s also largely a MacGuffin.

While we are told bad things are frequently occurring off-screen, the first act’s heroes, a school teacher named Marty (Karen Gillan), never waste a single moment staring into the abyss. They simply seek to close the distance between each other that technology, geography, and even divorce has made seemingly insurmountable. The great mystery of their lives is how to spend more time with one another… as well as maybe figure out how they know someone named Chuck.

Indeed, the titular character of the story doesn’t become a permanent fixture to the film until the second of three acts—with each reaching further back in the timeline first by months and then decades. Initially seen in his tailored suit and sleek-rimmed glasses, Hiddleston’s eponymous ant doesn’t cut the image of a free spirit who would dance at a boardwalk on a sunny afternoon. But that too is the other central mystery of the film, one which extends into childhood and lengthy, halcyon flashbacks that involve frequent Flanagan players like Kate Siegel as a poetry teacher and Mark Hamill and Mia Sara as a pair of grandparents haunted by literal and figurative ghosts in their attic.

To say more of the plot would give too much away. Besides, despite their high-concept opening, Flanagan and King do not seem nearly so concerned with story as they are with characters and the feelings they can evoke. The film is overflowing with both, in fact, with many more not mentioned in the above synopsis who are sometimes introduced via folksy voiceover narration, supplied by Nick Offerman, and sometimes purely by a great veteran performer like Matthew Lillard or Carl Lumbly, who appear visibly delighted to feast on one of Flanagan’s many lyrical monologues.

In some sense it probably is indulgent, in another it’s like iring a cathedral built to exact likeness inside of a snow globe. It’s a snapshot for perhaps all the characters and miscreants bouncing around a writer’s head, and nearly each is given a moment, a shot, or often a speech to express the full generosity of spirit bubbling within their author, or in this case their film.

This is obviously most true of Chuck Krantz, played by Hiddleston and Jacob Tremblay as a boy. Hiddleston carefully mingles an unspoken melancholy behind a mask of sweetness that is both genuine and labored. It is a carefully constructed portrait full of all the contradictions that make living worthwhile and heartbreaking. It anchors the film, but many of the other players make similar stabs, with perhaps Hamill getting the most rueful moments as a patriarch filled with secrets he can barely contain.

Like most of the other turns and characterizations, it is a quietly big swing which succeeds at populating the screen with the proverbial village that makes a single person’s life so universally important. With flickers of Capra-esque romance for “the little guy” and a surrealist’s appreciation for the spiritual and abstract, The Life of Chuck is a deceptively epic character study; an opera without singing—though again there’s plenty of dancing. It is even, I reckon, a masterpiece.

The Life of Chuck opens in limited release in the U.S. on June 6 and wide release on June 13. It opens in the UK on Aug. 22.