City Cinema: The Life of Chuck

Drama, Fantasy.
PG. Moderate language.
Dir: Mike Flanagan, US, 2025, 109 min.
Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Jacob Tremblay.

“Adapted by Mike Flanagan from Stephen King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent. Flanagan wants his audience to reflect on the passing moments of connection that carry outsize significance and the simple joys that make life worth living. Not saccharine but soulful, The Life of Chuck arrives at life-affirming profundity through a blend of surrealist wonder and humanist truth. It’s no wonder this marvel of a movie claimed the Toronto International Film Festival’s coveted audience prize last fall. Tom Hiddleston stars as the titular Charles Krantz, a dying accountant with a dormant love of dance, though we don’t properly meet him until the middle of three “acts” that unfold in reverse chronological order. But we do get enigmatic glimpses of him in “Thanks, Chuck,” an opening stanza that alternately unnerves and compels while posing a puzzle that’s pieced together in due time… In act II we meet Hiddleston’s Chuck as a genial fellow with a loving wife, a teenage son and an undetected brain tumor… As Chuck strolls past a drummer busking on a street corner, a dormant desire to dance takes over. Gleefully roping in a passerby fresh off a breakup, our startlingly loose-limbed protagonist struts up a storm in a euphoric jolt of live-life-to-the-fullest joy… While the horror auteur Flanagan is known for tapping into King’s disturbing side, The Life of Chuck marks an obvious departure. Now that he’s delivered an elegy in the vein of Stand By Me or The Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wondrous affirmation by way of Stephen King.” —Thomas Floyd, The Washington Post