The Life of Chuck (2025)

The Life of Chuck arrives with the People's Choice Award from Toronto and a certain solemnity about the human condition. Mike Flanagan adapts the Stephen King novella in reverse, beginning with the end of the universe and working backward to a boy learning to dance. The conceit is audacious in outline and gentle in execution. Stars blink out. A billboard thanks an accountant for thirty-nine great years. Nick Offerman narrates in the tone of a man reading a eulogy he wrote himself. This is a film convinced that an ordinary life is a cosmos, and it will not let us forget it.

That conviction is where the trouble starts. The screenplay distributes aphorisms the way a teacher hands out worksheets. Walt Whitman's line about containing multitudes becomes a thesis statement, then a lesson, then a closing benediction. Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar gets explained twice. The score plinks at every faux-profound moment, as one critic observed. Flanagan has never met a sentiment he was willing to leave unstated, and here he states all of them at length. The film is less a story than a sermon delivered by a very kind man who will not stop talking.

On the cultural ledger, the picture is mild. Its women, a grandmother, a teacher, a girl named Cat, shape Chuck's life without advancing any argument about gender. Its Black performers, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Carl Lumbly among them, move through a story that never notices race at all. There is no economic grievance, no climate parable, no identity thesis, no bodily or neurological catechism. What remains is a fantasy drama about dying well, overexplained and over-scored, sincere to its bones. We have seen worse. We have seen subtler.