As filmmakers go, Mike Flanagan is perhaps one of my biggest Me Problems. He is, by any account, one of the hottest horror directors working today, and many friends and fellow critics whose opinions I truly respect simply adore him— and yet, for whatever reason, I’ve never quite found myself able to vibe with his work. I thought his adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep had quite a bit going for it but was not particularly well served by its connections to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (which, to be fair, may be endemic to the source material), while Oculus comes so close to being something I’d love that I’ve rewatched it two or three times to make sure I didn’t miss something. Flanagan’s latest, The Life of Chuck, is another King adaptation, and it’s probably my favorite of his works I’ve seen so far. Yet there’s still something there keeping me from fully loving it— and I’m trying to figure out just what that is.
The Life of Chuck begins at the end— in more ways than one. The earth is in the middle of an unexplained turmoil which can only be described as apocalyptic: tsunamis engulf the oceans, California has fallen into the sea, and the entire internet has gone completely dark (“Even Pornhub is down,” murmurs a shell-shocked single father, played in cameo by David Dastmalchian, “How unfair is that?!”). Our windows into this world are Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an English teacher desperately trying to maintain his classroom as a bastion of normalcy, and Felicia (Karen Gillan), a doctor whose ER shift has grimly come to be known as “the suicide squad.” Marty and Felicia are exes, but they find themselves compelled by the times to stay closer in touch; how much weight can petty squabbles hold when the universe is literally deteriorating?
On top of everything else, these helpless earthlings muddling their way through their planet’s last gasps have to wrap their heads around a bizarre new marketing campaign: advertisements, plastered on every billboard and slipped into every broadcast, thanking one Chuck Krantz for “39 great years.” Nobody seems to know exactly who Chuck Krantz is, beyond an omnipresent stock photo of a smiling Tom Hiddleston (who, as Marty notices, can’t be much older than 40 himself). Should they know this guy? Is he selling something? Or is it simply, as Marty wonders, “our last meme?”
We do learn, of course, the nature of Chuck Krantz, though to divulge his relationship to the rest of these characters would be to give away the game. Just as the universe seems about to blink out, we jump backwards in time, first to a particularly memorable afternoon in Chuck’s adult life, then to his childhood (at which point Jacob Tremblay taps in for Hiddleston). By the end, we do indeed get a good picture of the life of this Chuck, and just why his face deserved to be on all those signs.
The Life of Chuck does something I would not have thought possible in the year 2025: it finds a novel way to adapt the work of Stephen King. King is, of course, one of the most adapted writers in human history (his work has, by my count, laid the groundwork for over 125 movies and TV shows to date), but nearly all of those adaptations have looked to King first and foremost as a storyteller, a source of (undeniably eerie) plots and characters to be molded into screenplay form. But just as crucial to King’s work is his voice, that plainspoken New England wit which serves as a baseline to all that horror business. More than any other King adaptation I’ve seen, The Life of Chuck treats King’s prose as reverently as it does his incident, both via gruff narration from Nick Offerman and placed in the mouths of its characters. Even though there’s no real “horror” here (outside of some light supernatural elements), there isn’t a shred of doubt whose work this is, and to fans of the King The Life of Chuck will fit as comfortably as the author’s signature Red Sox cap.
This approach would fall flat if Flanagan had not assembled a killer ensemble, but every role, from the major players to the bit parts, is cast with the utmost care. Hiddle-stans should take note that the actor, despite being the face of the film, only takes center stage during the truncated second act, but he takes advantage of his limited screen time with a dance sequence for the ages. The meatiest roles go to Mark Hammill and Mia Sara as Chuck’s grandparents, who deliver a pair of warm and expansive performances which will undoubtedly send Gen-Xers in the crowd running for their local AARP office (especially when they realize where they know Sara from). But the film is filled with one-scene appearances from a wildly eclectic bench of recognizable actors, from Harvey Guillen to Matthew Lillard to original Nightmare on Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp, plus a murderer’s row of Flanagan regulars. Next year’s Academy Awards will see the first-ever Oscar for Best Casting, and while I’m sure there will be starrier films in the running, I can think of few recent films to take such a thoughtful approach to their use of actors.
This sounds like a positive review so far, and I suppose it ultimately is; The Life of Chuck is a good movie, and probably my favorite of the Flanagan films I’ve seen so far. Yet I find there’s still something holding me back, something keeping me from loving it the way so many others seem to love it. The issue, I believe, lies somewhere in the film’s unashamedly syrupy sentiment. It’s not that it didn’t move me— there’s too much talent involved to fail completely on that front— but there’s just something a little too calculated in its tugs at the heartstrings. Everything, from the magic-hour Spielbergian cinematography to the twinkly score by the Newton Brothers, is just so satisfied in its ability to evoke emotions that I found my personal antibodies kicking in. The Life of Chuck is about how wonderful the world is and how precious our time on it. I agree— but does it have to be so smug about it?
Is this a Me Problem? I suppose it is, as my mutuals’ ratings on Letterboxd will confirm. But any critic worth their salt knows not to dance around their Me Problems, but to bring them to the light and elaborate on them. Regardless of what pedants might say, there is no such thing as “objective criticism”; criticism is, if anything, the art of subjectivity, and any critic who pretends otherwise is only giving their reader half the picture. The Life of Chuck is a fine picture, and it will probably mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people, but it left me colder than I would have liked, and I’m sure there are others who will feel the same way. If you share my Me Problem— if it’s an Us Problem— then my condolences, but know that you’re not alone. To everyone else, I am truly happy for you and your new favorite movie.
The Life of Chuck
2025
dir. Mike Flanagan
110 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and AMC Boston Common
