Based on a short story told in reverse order, the film veers between speculative mystery and coming-of-age drama, but it only works to a point.
Tom Hiddleston on Learning to Dance for Stephen King Adaptation 'The Life of Chuck'
By Siddhant Adlakha
Mike Flanagan's "The Life of Chuck" introduces a kind of mantra midway through its run, via a line of dialogue from Stephen King's novel of the same name: "Would answers make a good thing better?" The implication is an emphatic "No," which befits the maker of "The Haunting of Bly Manor"'s esoteric (and esotericly structured) drama about embracing life, death and cosmic mystery. But it also proves the point in all the wrong ways, lurching in and out of a clumsy literalism that robs the film of its most euphoric power.
Like King’s story — one of four novellas collected in the book “If It Bleeds” — “The Life of Chuck” is divided into three acts, each narrated in reverse order, by Nick Offerman. It opens with “Act Three,” which tells of the world falling apart from the perspective of a small American town. The internet has been glitching for months and is on the verge of failing, along with television and cell phone service. Meanwhile, climate change has ravaged nearly every country in the world (California nearly spilled into the Pacific Ocean) and suicide rates have skyrocketed, leaving local doctor Felicia (Karen Gillan) struggling to keep her head above water. And yet Flanagan manages the Herculean task of peppering this premise of rampant death with bursts of macabre and surreal humor, as Felicia’s ex, schoolteacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), tries to convince nihilistic parents to keep educating their children.
