‘The Life of Chuck’ Review: Mike Flanagan Reflects On Our Troubled Times With His Adaptation Of Stephen King’s Poignant Short Story Of Love, Life And Death – Toronto Film Festival
deadline.comThe TIFF People’s Choice Award is usually a bellwether to the Oscars, but this year the prize reflects rather more deep-seated global concerns among the voters than just the race to Best Picture.
Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King — one of the four in his 2020 novella If It Bleeds — The Life of Chuck is, as might be expected from the Master of the Macabre, a story of human mortality presented as a strange, surrealist comedy.
Charlie Kaufman has done this before — twice, in fact, with Synecdoche, New York (2008) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) — but Mike Flanagan’s film will likely go down a little smoother, with a lightness that undercuts the overarching tragedy.
Flanagan introduced the world premiere at Toronto with a quote from King himself: “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” Its relevance is not immediately clear but will become so over time, just as the recurring image of a billboard paying tribute to Charles “Chuck” Kranz — an accountant (played by Tom Hiddleston) retiring after “39 great years” — will finally reveal itself in the third act (which is actually the first, since the film unfolds in reverse order).
Read more on deadline.com
