The Life of Chuck

The Apocalypse of the Ordinary

In the modern cinematic landscape, the end of the world is usually a loud affair—a cacophony of crumbling skyscrapers, alien armadas, and heroes sprinting against a ticking clock. But in Mike Flanagan’s *The Life of Chuck*, the apocalypse arrives not with a bang, but with a quiet, confused whimper, accompanied by internet outages and strange billboards thanking a man nobody knows. Flanagan, a director previously celebrated for his mastery of gothic horror (*The Haunting of Hill House*, *Midnight Mass*), here executes a stunning pivot. He trades the supernatural terror of ghosts for the existential terror of mortality, delivering a film that suggests every human life is its own self-contained universe, the extinction of which is a cosmic event in its own right.



Adapted from a novella in Stephen King’s *If It Bleeds*, the film utilizes a daring reverse-chronological structure that could have easily dissolved into gimmickry. Instead, Flanagan wields this narrative inversion like a scalpel. We begin with Act Three—the end of the world—and work our way backward to the innocent beginnings of Charles "Chuck" Krantz. By showing us the finality of death first, Flanagan strips away the suspense of "what happens next" and replaces it with the far more poignant question of "what did it feel like?" The visual language shifts accordingly, moving from the claustrophobic, gray-washed dread of a dying civilization in the opening act to the golden, nostalgic hues of the mid-century past. It is a visual archaeology, digging through the strata of a single life to find the artifacts of joy buried beneath.



The film’s emotional centerpiece—and perhaps the most discussed sequence of the year—is the impromptu dance number in Act Two. Tom Hiddleston, playing the titular Chuck, sheds the reserved skin of a mild-mannered accountant to engage in a euphoric, spontaneous dance with a stranger on a city street. In the hands of a lesser director, this might have played as cloying whimsy. However, framed against the audience’s foreknowledge of Chuck’s fate (and the world’s), the scene transforms into a radical act of defiance. Hiddleston’s performance here is physically loose but emotionally precise; he embodies the Walt Whitman quote that serves as the film’s spiritual spine: "I contain multitudes." The camera swirls around him, not to capture a spectacle, but to capture a fleeting spark of divinity in an ordinary afternoon.



Ultimately, *The Life of Chuck* is a rejection of cynicism. It posits that there is no such thing as an "ordinary" person. By linking the death of a modest man to the literal collapse of the stars, Flanagan argues that when we lose a person, we lose an entire library of memories, sensory experiences, and private worlds. The film does not shy away from the sorrow of the inevitable fade-to-black, but it refuses to let that sorrow consume the beauty of the projection. It is a humane, deeply felt work that asks us to look at the strangers around us and realize that they, too, are holding up the sky.