You get a nagging sense throughout Mike Flanagan’s lachrymose take on a Stephen King novella from 2020 that you’re watching something that will change people’s lives. Characters riff grandly on the “I contain multitudes” line from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. The great lesson seems to be that our own death involves the effective annihilation of all. And a happy late summer to you too.
The Life of Chuck, told backwards in three acts, begins strongly at the apocalyptic end with Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher in a small town, failing to cope as the world collapses around him. Lumps of the US west coast have crashed into the sea. Sinkholes appear in Earth’s crust. Worst of all – scarcely conceivable, indeed – the internet is ceasing to function.
Meanwhile, Marty and his ex-wife (Karen Gillan) puzzle over mysterious billboards featuring a handsome, if ordinary, face, above the words “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!”
That first (third) act functions effectively as a bewitching enigmatic short that gets away with its downbeat denouement. The audience can fill the gaps in whatever enigmatic way they see fit.
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Unfortunately the movie continues backwards into increasingly mawkish territory as – look away if you want to arrive entirely unspoiled – we learn that this Chuck Krantz, played with some purchase by Tom Hiddleston, is dying of a brain disease and is trying to make the best of what little remains.
This prematurely takes in a street-dance number that, while smoothly pulled off by Hiddleston and Annalise Basso, as a drumming busker, asks too much of those not well disposed to trite manipulation.
The final (first) act explains how, when Chuck was a young fellow, his grandmother taught him to love dance after his parents died, and, in a very Kingian touch, introduces us to a terrifying room at the top of a creaky staircase.
When The Life of Chuck won the People’s Choice award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, beating the likes of Anora and I’m Still Here, it looked likely to become a phenomenon on its US release. That hasn’t quite happened, but the fans it has acquired seem moved to near-religious ecstasy.
Those who find the latter sections a maudlin trial must face up to evangelists pressing the thing upon us at parties until sinkholes gather us all into the great unknown.
In cinemas from Wednesday, August 20th
