There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and yearly Stephen King adaptations. His novels offer a bit of everything – horror for the adrenaline junkies, drama for the less fright-loving — but always with a keen study of the human condition. For film adaptations, he’s been lucky. Since Carrie dunked a bucket of ‘blood’ over a telekinetic girl’s head and Jack Torrance screamed, ‘Here’s Johnny!’ in The Shining, our beloved ‘Kingaverse’ has been as constant as the sun. 

Mike Flanagan is the current custodian of all things King. Like Frank Darabont, who helmed Shawshank, The Green Mile, and The Mist, he’s even on a King streak. Having directed Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, he now tackles a distinctly offbeat short story, The Life of Chuck, that appeared in King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds. 

Told in three distinct chapters, we begin at the end: planets are disappearing, fires and floods reshape the Earth and, most unnervingly of all, the internet is down. Our deepest fears are realised, in true King fashion, through the eyes of a few average Joes. The first is high school teacher, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an Everyman haunted by mysterious images of Chuck Krantz, a famous personality who has retired after 39 years of doing… something. It’s not quite clear. 

Chuck’s on billboards, TV ads and, even more strangely, inside of windows (yes, between the double glazing). Consequently, Marty’s sanity is tested. He never feels like a well-drawn character — he’s a reaction to the world around him — but as a sensible, pragmatic type it’s fun to see him grapple with peculiarity alongside ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan). Their story is one of disjointed vignettes clearly inspired by COVID-era paranoia — hospitals, empty streets, scenes of in-home idleness — but do little to entice us into the deeper narrative. Mystery is mistaken for substance, and every action is bathed in profundity on which we’re never clued in. 

Flanagan poses many sophisticated, high-minded questions about our internal universe — the line, ‘I contain multitudes,’ is a motif throughout — but these elements strike as more novelistic than cinematic. It’s Tom Hiddleston’s Chuck that promises firmer ground. A charming, bink-and-you’ll-miss-him title character who doesn’t show up until halfway through his own movie. His arrival in Chapter Two is, thankfully, a sign of things to come. Nick Offerman’s voice lays the mystery on thick, as Chuck, a little subdued by years of accounting, finds joy in an unexpected place: dance. 

Depending on your sensitivity to spontaneous dance sequences, Flanagan may have miscalculated our cringe-factor. Hiddleston is a natural mover, but there’s something to his confident toe-tapping that’s unsettling, especially in a non-musical film. His time is short, though, only appearing for a quick boogie before a movie-stealing Benjamin Pajak takes over as ten-year-old Chuck (to be replaced later as a teen by Jacob Tremblay). 

Here, Flanagan finds his rhythm. He drops pure indulgence for a Spielbergian coming-of-age movie, projecting a warmth and emotion that makes young Chuck more compelling than his adult counterpart. He’s a recent orphan living with his grandmother, Sarah (Mia Sara), and alcoholic grandfather, Albie (a moustachioed Mark Hamill), and his life is very Stephen King: a small town, traumatic past, and an attic playing host to spirits. These ingredients are Flanagan’s bread and butter, and the movie takes an upturn as a result. 

Daring to reverse a film’s structure though, is a delicate business, one of which Flanagan may have underestimated the cinematic whiplash. To arrive at Chapter Three may take more sheer willpower than is reasonable to ask. Only at the end do we find solidity in Chuck’s world – there’s probably a metaphor in that. 

A large portion of The Life of Chuck feels misspent on theory, rather than concrete fundamentals. It’s a poetic study of life and death, without much in the way of originality, even in the superior latter half. Ejiofor and Gillian shine, as does Hiddleston, our resident song and dance man, but their parts in this sprawling saga are slight. If we do indeed contain multitudes, Chuck missed the memo.

In cinemas nationwide now