This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Release details for The Life of Chuck are TBD. Were the collected works of Stephen King a mighty hotel in the mountains, Mike Flanagan would be a shoo-in for the job of caretaker.
Or has he always been the caretaker? Even before the writer-director started tackling the author’s canon, his projects seemed indebted to King, even possessed by him; just look at the time-jumping architecture of Oculus and the Netflix limited series The Haunting of Hill House . Since telling those rather Kingish tales of terror, Flanagan has made his fandom official, joining the likes of Rob Reiner, Frank Darabont, and Mick Garris in the exclusive club of filmmakers with multiple King movies on their resumes. What’s more, he’s adventurously risen to the challenge of taking on stories not so easily translated to the screen – with his adaptation of the supposedly unadaptable Gerald’s Game , with a Doctor Sleep that somehow functioned as a sequel to both versions of The Shining , and now with an extremely faithful take on a structurally ambitious King novella, The Life of Chuck.
There are no ghosts or ghoulies in the source material, a 100-some-page yarn pulled from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. Instead, this is the author at his most metaphysically soggy – Uncle Steve the stoned philosopher, waxing on about galaxies on blades of grass, using a light supernatural conceit to extol the beauty of life’s.