Despite its pedigree — a Mike Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King short story from a collection called If It Bleeds — The Life of Chuck is not horror. Apologies to anyone hoping for a little degloving or soul eating à la Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. It does feature a brief appearance from A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Heather Langenkamp and some disturbing ideas, but this oddity doesn’t fit neatly with the rest of the director’s genre work, even his previous takes on King. Instead, The Life of Chuck angles for the appeal of the gentler King adaptations, notably Stand by Me, The Green Mile, and, of course, every dude of a certain age’s favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. (Which is great! But there have been other, better movies made, guys.) The Life of Chuck has a big heart and big ideas, the kind that will likely make the most boring person you know sing its praises when it ambles onto Netflix in five years.
The Life of Chuck also has plenty of charms: it’s warm and wistful without shying away from how scary and sad the world can be. It has Tom Hiddleston dancing on the street, Carl Lumbly smoking a pipe, and Mark Hamill waxing poetic about the merits of math. It boasts both a cast of Flanagan regulars (Jacob Tremblay, Michael Trucco, Rahul Kohli, Violet McGraw, and Kate Siegel) and first-timers who are always welcome presences (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, David Dastmalchian, Harvey Guillén, Mia Sara, and Matthew Lillard). It’s unsettling and uplifting and uncategorizable. It’s much weirder than most of what plays at movie theaters, but it’s also far more sincere.
It’s also almost impossible to talk about in any detail without spoiling it. As its title implies, The Life of Chuck is about, well, the life of a guy named Chuck, played across three acts in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood by Benjamin Pajak, Tremblay, and Hiddleston, respectively. He lives a life that is simultaneously ordinary and utterly unique. He makes an impact on and is impacted by everyone around him, even those who seem like minor characters. It is more and less than the sum of its parts. I almost look forward to people not knowing how to talk about this movie but desperately needing to talk about this movie because it is more than a little wild and also pretty moving if you haven’t been broken by, you know, everything.
The Life of Chuck at once lays out how small and insignificant we are in the universe (courtesy of a metaphor attributed to Carl Sagan with the appropriate reverence) and how much who we are and who we love matters. Both of these things can be true at the same time (and are), but that juxtaposition doesn’t always work. Flanagan has proved adept at revealing tenderness amidst terror in the family dramas present in The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Each of those Netflix shows had some supremely disturbing scenes alongside moments of real love and affection. The filmmaker flips the ratio here, doling out just a bit of horror alongside the everyday experience of being a human who lives among other humans. He’s better at the horror, but there’s a lovely sense of wonder too. We’re all so small in the grand scheme of both the span of time and the scope of the universe, and yet so important to other small beings, if we’re lucky.
The Life of Chuck wears its heart on its sleeve, but that’s such an easy, unprotected place to punch. Flanagan has made a wonderfully weird film that may worm its way into your heart against your better judgment. It is not as great or as mind-blowing as it thinks it is, but there’s something special about its earnestness and unpredictability in a sea of cynical cinema.
B
“The Life of Chuck” is in theaters this weekend.
