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It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) does not feel fine. Outside the room where this 39-year-old accountant lies in bed, there are earthquakes and sinkholes and volcanoes erupting in Germany. California has fallen into the ocean. Suicide rates are through the roof. Both our social infrastructure and the internet are on the verge of collapse. Pornhub, however, is already offline. We repeat: Pornhub. Is. Offline!
Inside that room, however, Krantz is also in the process of dying. His wife (The Lost World‘s Q’orianka Kilcher) and child sit by his side, as a monitor pings and a brain tumor slowly, silently kills him. This anonymous gentleman has lived a life of quiet desperation, with the occasional showstopping display of public dancing that’s meant to represent how a single step on the road you wished you’d traveled can lead to momentary bliss, in the most light-footed and heavy-handed way. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. And given that Mike Flanagan‘s adaptation of Stephen King‘s novella stays faithful to the source material’s structure by beginning at the end, we’ll stay here for a hot second as well. Chuck will soon shuffle off this mortal coil. Humanity as a whole is just a few baby steps behind him.
But lo, what’s this?! A billboard, apparently erected overnight, featuring Krantz sitting at his desk and thanking him for “39 great years”? Plus every radio station and local television channel is broadcasting an equally grateful ad, commemorating this previously unheralded, unheard-of cruncher of numbers? No one knew who this Chuck person was before now. Not Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the teacher gamely trying to enlighten high school students on the glories of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Not Gus (Matthew Lilliard), Marty’s blue-collar neighbor, who bemoans the sorrow and the pity of it all. Not Sam (Carl Lumbly), the kindly undertaker that Marty meets on the last day on Earth. And not Felicia (Karen Gillian), the overworked E.R. nurse who Marty was married to once upon a time, and who he will spend his final moments with, before the existence of everything that ever was is snuffed out in an instant.
This is how The Life of Chuck imagines we’ll go out, all grateful, it-was-a-good-run whimpers and no climactic big bangs. But hey, never mind the apocalypse — let’s watch Tom Hiddleston dance! Both King’s short story (from his 2020 collection If It Bleeds) and Flanagan’s interpretation of the material establish this mystery man as a sort of blank slate, a figurehead that everyone can project their thoughts, feelings, joys, and regrets onto while facing total extinction. You might think some sort of Truman Show-like hot take on instant celebrity awaits as well. But then we rewind to Act Two, which centers on Chuck’s excursion to Boston for a conference. He happens to walk by the Pocket Queen (Taylor Franck), a drummer busking in a downtown square. A woman named Janice (Snowpiercer‘s Annalise Basso) has just been dumped by text. She’s watching the musician do her thing. A funky beat gets laid down. Chuck suddenly breaks into an impromptu boogie. He pulls Janice from the crowd, and wouldn’t you know it, we have a good old-fashioned pas de deux on our hands.
On the page, the sequence reads fine. On the screen, however, it’s a bona fide musical number, pumped up to movie-movie levels of shock and awe. Look, we’re not monsters. It turns out that the Loki star is a Grade A expert hoofer, as is Basso. So far be it from us to deny anyone — including ourselves — the sheer pleasure of watching two people dance with such grace, élan, and good old-fashioned sex appeal. Flanagan is no stranger to King’s work, whether it’s tackling the author’s actual literary touchstones or fashioning his own masterpieces that owe a strong debt to the horror icon’s back catalog. Thanks to Hiddleston and Basso, however, the filmmaker takes one of King’s more pensive, scare-free stories, cherry-picks an incident from the very middle of it, and comes up with the sort of stand-alone sequence that is destined to be memed in perpetuity and garner gajillions of views on YouTube from now until doomsday. It’s less Master of the Macabre and more MGM musical extravaganza. The Life of Chuck will forever be known as the movie featuring The Dance of Tom. And therein lies its blessing and its curse.
Because without that sequence … let’s be honest: You’ve got nothing but saccharine-coated bupkis. Before Hiddleston and Basso go full metal Fred and Ginger, you’re subjected to some mild handwringing about what it all means, why we’re here and what happens when it all goes away, with excellent actors trying their damnedest to make the dorm-room philosophizing feel profound. A sappy score and Nick Offerman‘s wry, irony-soaked narration, taken wholehearted from King’s prose, don’t help matters. But on the other side of that middle-act set piece, you have a long chapter on Chuck’s childhood, which fills you in on how the future accountant originally got his groove on. It involves his grandparents, played by Mark Hamill and Mia Sara, she of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; a school dance; and young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) overcoming his shyness in order to waltz, swing, and moonwalk his way into his classmates’ hearts. We’ve already endured a lot of touchy-feely platitudes. Now we’re subjected to sub-Spielberg sentimentality with an extra side of schmaltz. Goodbye, good will earned.
There’s also a haunted room, one which our hero is forbidden to enter and that eventually offers Teen Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) a vision of things to come. Should you not have picked up on the potential subjectivity of that first act — or rather, the last act that’s placed first — and somehow forgotten despite the movie’s countless reminders that we all contain multitudes, this underlines the notion several more times. In the midst of life we are in death, but also vice versa, etc. The Life of Chuck wants you to feel the sheer wonder of being alive, and it’s willing to beat this beatific idea into you over and over again just to ensure you get the emotional gist of it. This is the sort of uplifting parable about elevating the everyman that makes you leave the theater angry at being so gracelessly manipulated and jerked around. Hiddleston’s soft shoe gives you a glimpse of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. The movie surrounding it, however, seems determined to make the extraordinary seem as bumper-sticker simple and banal as humanly possible.
