The Life of Chuck

The Galaxies We Take With Us

The end of the world, it turns out, is mostly just a hassle. When Mike Flanagan’s *The Life of Chuck* begins, the apocalypse doesn’t arrive as some big, fiery spectacle. It shows up as a slow failure of basic systems. The internet dies. California slides into the ocean. People still drag themselves to parent-teacher conferences. I can’t tell if this down-to-earth doomsday is inspired or simply cheaper to film, but either way, it lands. We stick with Marty, a drained schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor, wearing exhaustion in the droop of his shoulders), and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) as they move through a society that’s quietly powering down. And everywhere: billboards, ads, cheery little messages—"39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!" Who is Chuck? And why is the universe applauding him while everything falls apart?



Flanagan has spent the past decade becoming the go-to translator of Stephen King’s bad dreams—*Doctor Sleep*, *Gerald's Game*, plus all those Netflix monologues dissecting how ghosts work. This time he swerves. Working from a 2020 King novella, he ditches the ghouls and keeps the existential dread—and, oddly enough, something close to optimism. The film runs backward, unspooling Charles “Chuck” Krantz from his death at 39 to his childhood. It’s basically Walt Whitman’s *Song of Myself*—"I am large, I contain multitudes."—turned into a plot engine. The idea is disarmingly plain: when a person dies, a whole universe goes with them. Every memory, every person they ever met, the exact way the light hit the pavement on some random Tuesday in 1998—gone. Just… off.



I usually push back on movies that work this hard to make me marvel at the gift of existence. It can start to feel like you’re trapped inside a motivational poster. *The LA Times'* Amy Nicholson wasn’t totally off when she called it an "apocalyptic, soul-seeking puzzle that's missing a few pieces." And Nick Offerman’s narration sometimes slides from folksy into a bit too much. (Every so often a scene just needs room to breathe without a big voice insisting on the takeaway.) Still, once the second act hits, my cynicism didn’t so much retreat as simply dissolve.



That’s when we finally meet the adult Chuck, played by Tom Hiddleston: an accountant on a business trip. Stiff suit, practical briefcase, aggressively normal. He passes a street busker on a drum kit and—without warning—he dances. Not a cute little beat-matching shuffle, either. It’s huge and ecstatic. Pay attention to Hiddleston’s body here: how the tight, corporate posture gives way inch by inch to the rhythm. His arms and legs unhook, his face warms, and for a moment he’s not a doomed man with a brain tumor or a numbers guy on a work trip. He’s just movement and joy. Hiddleston, who so often plays with that arched, wound-spring tension, looks honestly freed. The scene doesn’t merely argue for the beauty of being alive; it makes you feel it in muscle and breath.

By the time we reach the final act—Chuck as a kid with his grandparents, played with real ache by Mark Hamill and Mia Sara—the pieces click into place. You realize you haven’t been watching a movie about the end of the world at all. You’ve been inside the last bright flare of a dying brain, synapses firing their final sparks. Whether that hits you as profound or too sweet probably depends on how close grief is sitting to you right now. For me, it lingered for days. We obsess over what we’ll leave behind out in the world and forget how enormous the inner worlds are, too. *The Life of Chuck* isn’t a flawless machine, but it feels unmistakably human. It made me want to look a little longer at strangers on the street and wonder what galaxies might be folding in on themselves inside their heads.