What if I told you there was a magical realism Stephen King adaptation in theaters, directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Tom Hiddleston? Well, I feel like The Life of Chuck should be getting a lot more buzz.
It's a time warp of a movie with a lot of fascinating elements and ideas at its core.
Today, I want to go over all the crazy things that happen in the film and explain its controversial ending.
Let's dive in.
The Life of Chuck
The Life of Chuck is a new film based on the Stephen King novella from his 2020 collection, If It Bleeds. It unfolds in reverse chronological order, presenting a puzzle that slowly reveals a moving portrait of an ordinary man's life.
The movie got a limited release on June 6, 2025, and is set for a nationwide release on June 13, 2025.
The movie is directed by Mike Flanagan and features a star-studded cast including Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Mark Hamill.
The Life of Chuck Summary
'The Life of Chuck'
Credit: Neon
What happens in the movie? The Life of Chuck is a structurally unique story that takes on the idea that every individual's consciousness contains an entire universe, and when a person dies, that world dies with them.
The story is presented in three acts, beginning with the end:
Act III: The Collapse
We learn that the world is ending. Strange phenomena plague the globe: the internet has collapsed, California is sinking into the ocean, and massive sinkholes appear without warning. Amidst this apocalyptic backdrop, a curious and ubiquitous advertising campaign appears everywhere. On billboards, in newspapers, and on television, the smiling face of a nondescript banker named Charles "Chuck" Krantz appears with the simple, baffling message: "39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK!" For Marty Anderson, a schoolteacher witnessing the world's decay, these ads become a haunting obsession.
Act II: The Dance
The story then jumps back in time. The world is normal, bustling, and full of life. We see Chuck Krantz, a man in his prime, walking down a city street. In a moment of pure, unadulterated joy and spontaneity, he begins to dance with a street busker, captivating onlookers. This act presents a vibrant snapshot of the man whose face is a symbol of the apocalypse in the previous chapter, showing him in a moment of profound vitality.
Act I: The Beginning
The final act takes us to Chuck's childhood. Raised by his grandparents in a house believed to be haunted, Chuck develops a fear of the locked cupola. There, he bonds with his grandparents, takes dance lessons, and develops his first crush. After his grandfather's passing, Chuck, now a young boy, confronts his fear and enters the room. Inside, he has a profound and formative vision: he sees his own future, the entirety of his life stretching before him, culminating in the vision of his own dying self in a hospital bed at the age of 39. He understands that the "haunting" is not a ghost, but the echo of his own life and consciousness that fills the house—and the world.
What Does It All Mean?
The reverse chronology masterfully reveals the story's central truth: the apocalyptic events of the first act are not the end of the physical world, but a metaphor for the shutting down of Chuck's mind and body as he dies from a brain tumor at 39.
After watching the whole movie, you learn that in the opening third, where the world ends, those are actually the people inside Chuck, whom he has met over the course of his entire life. When he dies, they die as well. But it doesn't mean their lives are meaningless, it means they lived inside him and had beautiful and eventful lives, too.
As the movie keeps going, we meet people who we've seen in the mother chapters, but now we see their real-life counterparts and what inspired them inside Chuck's multitude's world.
In the dance scene in the middle, we see Chuck full of vitality, and a hint of the brain tumor that will kill him soon. We also get the lessons of just seizing the day, because you have no idea when death will come for you.
We learn he heard the Walt Whitman Poem, "A Song of Myself", when he was a kid in school, and that's where he learned about containing multitudes.
The film argues that each individual's experiences, relationships, and memories create a rich and complex universe. The loss of a single life, therefore, is akin to the end of a world.
In the final third, when Chuck finally gets into the cupola and sees that he will die someday and how, we can assume that inspired the rest of his life. He has no idea when he will die, but he knows it will happen.
That means Chuck knows he has to live, he has to take chances, and stop to dance. He knows life will end in tragedy someday, just like all our lives might, but Chuck has to dare to then live, so he can contain multitudes.
Summing It Up
This is a truly beautiful message inside this film, which is creative and challenging. I loved the first third, which I think showed us how important love and kinship are, even in the hardest times.
And the other two support the idea that we have to live a life where we embrace the day and show love to the people around us, because we have no idea when they'll be gone.
In the end, it's a movie that I think you'll want to watch twice to pick up all the nuance.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
