Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game are faithful – perhaps to a fault – takes on the writer’s novels, channelling King’s feel for emotion, dialogue, suspense and shock alongside fitful echoes of his lapses into folksy woolliness.
Flanagan extends this connection into a stirring riff on one of King’s non-horror novellas in The Life of Chuck, a crowd-pleaser in the heart-tickling vein – if not quite class – of Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption.
Even if the result can trip over its hoofing feet, it’s not for want of sincere engagement with King’s tale.
We find out more in act two, where Chuck emerges as an accountant (Tom Hiddleston) in his late 30s. Chuck is facing tough times. But in the meantime he makes a spontaneous, joyful dance connection with a heart-broken woman to a street busker’s vigorous drumbeat.
These synopses only skate over the surface of the film, which also cogitates lightly on climate change, cosmic forces, time, choices, human connections, inner universes and the moonwalk. Its philosophies tend towards the homespun, but the musical rhythms of Flanagan’s direction help leaven the load and his way with actors adds plenty of unforced lift.
Even then, a cameoing Matthew Lillard almost steals the show as one of King’s ardent chatterboxes.
View oEmbed on the source websiteThe opening sequence projects a kind of cosmic dread, while strange things occur behind a cupola door – a cousin to other ominous doorways in The Shining, perhaps – in the climax.
Whether you accept that as a workable life metaphor or not, The Life of Chuck is entertaining, imaginative and affirmative enough to tempt a rewind to the beginning (or end), just to see whether it does all slot together.
The Life of Chuck is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 20th August 2025.
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