Knock on Wood

Stephen King and Mike Flanagan have led oddly parallel careers, several decades apart. After a spate of amateur works, both of them found success in small-scale, but still incredibly effective, horror tales that touched the hearts and scared the pants off enough people to make a name for themselves. It was inevitable that their mediums (King’s prose, Flanagan’s films and series) would collide, but now Flanagan has advanced to the next level that King achieved with hits like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption (both originally published under different titles) – the horror is sidestepped in favor of a deeper examination into humanity and our capacity for imagination and hope. It only makes sense that Flanagan’s foray into this realm comes at another intersection with King’s work.

The Life of Chuck, poised to be Flanagan’s highest-profile film yet, is also his first feature outside of the horror genre; after years of groundbreaking work in the scary movies, he is delving into optimistic and inspiring storytelling that showcases not the worst, but the best humanity has to offer. It’s also his first feature in six years (don’t get me wrong, I love his miniseries as much as the next guy), and a welcome return to shorter-form narrative. He has always been one of my favorite filmmakers, especially because it seems he can do anything – adapting, sequelizing, expanding original worlds filled with emotionally complex characters…he seems almost a perfect match for King’s anecdotal, idiosyncratic style.

Chuck is vaguely anthological, where every new story we see reframes everything we’ve seen so far in the life of the titular Chuck Krantz (Thor’s Tom Hiddleston), whose story we experience in reverse – from his last breath to the tragedy that shaped his young life. I have no hesitation in saying that Chuck is my new favorite Flanagan film; it speaks intensely and deeply to the universal phenomenon of feeding the endless world inside your head with your own experiences, the faces you’ve seen, and the emotions you feel over the course of your all-too-brief existence. Everyone has one, a little world inside your mind, but it’s the job of the creatives to make it their reality, and Flanagan’s rendition of King’s sentiment is nothing short of euphoric.

Moreover, the central thesis takes a similar shape on both page and screen. The film perfectly captures the incredibly unique experience of reading a Stephen King story (Chuck is adapted from a 2020 novella, bundled in the collection If It Bleeds), and both creative forces are externalizing the universes they’ve built inside over the decades. Chuck’s story is a conduit for both King and Flanagan’s reckoning with their own worlds, and exploring the idea of what happens to those worlds after they’re gone. The totality of stories we bring into our own lives (both consciously and unconsciously) is astounding, and Chuck manages to be simultaneously warm, austere, and playful when encouraging us to confront our mortality and choices. It spoke to me very intensely as a creative.

Due to its multitudinous scope, the film is the ultimate crossover of Flanagan’s trademark ensemble (which keeps growing with every new project) and some new faces that round out the remaining spots. Hiddleston plays the adult Krantz, but he’s joined by Jacob Tremblay (Room), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange), Karen Gillan (Guardians of the Galaxy), Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Annalise Basso (Snowpiercer), Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Matthew Lillard (Scooby-Doo), Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep), and a slew of one-scene supporting performances that define the aforementioned emotion of any given scene. Nick Offerman’s dulcet narration draws the line between gruff and sweet, and despite the scale of the production, the ensemble feels very intimate and personal, which makes sense considering the subject matter.

The Life of Chuck touched me deep in my soul, and I lost track of how many times I cried. At a certain point, the emotion became a reflex. It’s moving and sentimental, but never overly saccharine. Like most of Flanagan’s work, it’s highly evocative, but this time of memory rather than fright. It’s also higher in concept than I was expecting, but that grounds it rather than removing it from reality – its ideas are fully-rounded and hit entirely too close to home to be anything but energizing. Whether you are an accountant, a filmmaker, a musician, an artist of any kind…allow your world to thrive. You’ll be thankful for it.

“I’m wonderful. I deserve to be wonderful. I contain multitudes.”

The Life of Chuck opens in limited theaters this Friday, and nationwide on June 13.