TIFF 2024 Review: The Life of Chuck – “a life-affirming crowd-pleaser.”

Courtesy of TIFF

What would you do if you knew the world was ending?  What about just if YOUR world was ending?  Many characters in Mike Flanagan‘s newest film, The Life of Chuck, face these existential questions.

When Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) hears that the internet is down for good, he is not too concerned.  He made paper copies of all his students’ files when it started going on the fritz months ago.  The hardest part, as brought up by a father during a parent-teacher conference, is that Pornhub can no longer be accessed.  A tragedy.  But then California falls into the ocean, and wildfires are blazing.  The bees are gone.  Florida is flooded.  Germany has a volcano that is erupting.  After years of abuse, the Earth is just finished.

People just start giving up.  Marty’s ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan) is a nurse at the local hospital.  One of the last healthcare workers left, the rest having just walked off the job, her team is known as the ‘suicide squad.’  As the world starts to implode, Marty and Felicia reconnect and talk about these signs they are seeing thanking a man named Charles Krantz for 39 great years.  They hear it on the radio and then see an ad on television.  Stranger still is no one seems to know who this Chuck is.

To fill you in on more would be to spoil this film’s carefully placed breadcrumbs, which is part of the fun.  But, rest assured you’re about to become intimately acquainted with Chuck, as an adult (Tom Hiddleston), a child (Benjamin Pajak) and a teenager (Jacob Tremblay).  You’ll also get to know the colourful cast of characters around him including his grandfather, played by Mark Hamill, and an absolutely scene-stealing Samantha Sloyan (Fall of the House of Usher) as one of young Chuck’s teachers.

Being that The Life of Chuck is an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, you can be sure that things are not always as they seem.  But people who aren’t horror fans need not fret.  This film, despite being directed by Flanagan, known for The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor (amongst other scary fare) is not here to haunt you.  Instead, he’s here to get a little philosophical, with a supernatural twist.  It all feels a little like Tim Burton making Big Fish, full of bright colours, interesting characters and huge stories.

As we get to know Chuck through three distinct acts, told in reverse, a few things become apparent:

1. Tom Hiddleston should always dance in any movies moving forward
2. Nick Offerman should narrate life
3. The Life of Chuck is a life-affirming crowd-pleaser that asks us to contemplate what we do in the space between the start of our lives and death

‘Waiting is the hard part,’ the film notes, but that waiting period, it’s also kind of the point.  Does knowing when the end is coming make things any different? Or do we simply need to just live, to create our world, vast and colourful.  As Walt Whitman said, we ‘contain multitudes.’  It’s an idea brought up a few times in the film, and remembering that will allow you to appreciate all its details.  We are made of all our experiences and the people that we meet.  The Life of Chuck reminds us that all those moments, big and small, are what make life worth living.

The Life of Chuck had its world premiere September 6, 2024 at the Toronto International Film Festival.  For more information head to tiff.net.