Ernst Lubitsch had the Lubitsch Touch in bringing classy filmmaking to mass-market concepts like rom-coms, and today Mike Flanagan has the Flanagan Touch in infusing emotional depth into spectacle genres. Mostly horror, but now a wackadoo sci-fi think piece, too, with “The Life of Chuck” (in film festivals in 2024 with a wider release in 2025).
The writer-director’s third Stephen King adaptation – this time of a 2020 novella – is technically wackadoo sci-fi philosophizing, but it stops short of building a world and barely has a narrative. It’s a meditation on life, death, existence and perspective, centered on the most normal of guys. Though Tom Hiddleston gets top billing, three younger actors also play Chuck, with tween Benjamin Pajak doing the heaviest lifting.
Flanagan refreshes a couple of cliched concepts: Every individual contains multitudes, and live life to the fullest. But it’s an anti-“Forrest Gump” in terms of what happens. Chuck is not famous, he doesn’t meet anyone famous, and he does not secretly change the world (unless we get deeper into the film’s metaphorical level, where we can argue that everyone changes the world). The film taps Nick Offerman to keep the narration wry and dry.
“The Life of Chuck” (2025)
Director: Mike Flanagan
Writers: Mike Flanagan (screenplay), Stephen King (short story)
Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benjamin Pajak
A big life lived small … or vice versa
Though it’s debatable whether they should’ve tried for a twisty dive into the fabric of reality – something far out like “The Langoliers” — Flanagan and King do dodge the cliché of making the narrative smaller by linking everything up. This keeps “Life of Chuck” about the life of Chuck and nothing more, but we see how big this one typical life is. Chuck’s scenes across from his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, enjoying a resurgence between this and “The Long Walk”) mean nothing and everything.
The most touching mini-plot finds tween Chuck in his extracurricular dance class. He’s great at dancing, and so is an older, taller girl, Cat (Trinity McCoy). The typical Hollywood bildungsroman would find Chuck and Cat growing up to be married, but “Life of Chuck” – which unfolds in three acts in reverse order – is more interested in real life than Hollywood.
Except when it’s not. Sans Chuck (except for the mystery of who is this Chuck of the billboards and TV ads), the first act we see (Act III) portrays the gradual end of the world via the grief and emotional confusion people feel when the internet stops working. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan star in this segment, with Matthew Lillard popping in for a nice monolog.
Flanagan gets a lot from a little, not needing wowsa CGI of environmental disasters; instead, we see people react to TV and radio reports. The director lets it wash over us. He gives us time to soak up a believably mundane drift into apocalypse and let our thoughts drift along these lines.
We’re all part of the universe, and we are all our own universe. We’re all small, but we’re all big fish in small ponds. To make these ideas into a short novel is one thing, to make them into an engaging film is another. This isn’t his very best movie or miniseries, but that he wrings emotions out of King’s throwaway thought experiment marks the deftest example of the Flanagan Touch.