Streamin’ King: ‘The Life of Chuck’ Is Full Of Big Feelings And Unlike Any Other Stephen King Adaptation

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching The Life of Chuck, the 2025 film based on the 2020 novella. 

THE GIST: A nonlinear meditation on the universe that lives—and dies—inside every one of us. If you know, you know; if you don’t, you’re in wonderful shape going in cold. Starry in multiple senses, full of dancing, even fuller of big feelings.

PEDIGREE: A fully independent production written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House), the preeminent Stephen King adapter of our times, with The Life of Chuck marking his third consecutive SK movie. He gave us Gerald’s Game on Netflix in 2017 (which launched Streamin’ King) and the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep in 2019; now he’s got a Carrie miniseries coming to Amazon and the rights to The Dark Tower. The 47-year-old father of three said Chuck is “a movie that I felt like I had to make and a movie that I wanted to exist in the world for my children,” thinking ahead to “when I’m no longer there in person, to try to comfort them when they feel like their world is ending.” We’ll dive much deeper into the Flanagan of it all in the TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY section. What’s also worth noting re: pedigree is the fact he made five excellent horror miniseries for Netflix across five years, and in 2016 wrote, directed, and edited three features—Hush, Before I Wake, and Ouija: Origin of Evil. In September 2024, The Life of Chuck won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, a many-time predictor of Best Picture Oscar nominees.

Stars Emmy nominee Tom Hiddleston in his first non-Marvel feature in eight years, Mark Hamill coming off Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor with the winds of Venom III and Bridget Jones IV at his back, eight-time MCU MVP Karen Gillan, and Benjamin Pajak in his film debut. Features Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Jacob Tremblay (Room), Carl Lumbly (Captain America: Brave New World), Samantha Sloyan (The Pitt), Annalise Basso (Snowpiercer), and the Pocket Queen, a Grammy nominee. Quick, potent appearances from David Dastmalchian, Matthew Lillard, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Harvey Guillén, and, briefly, Flanagan and Siegel’s son Cody. Narration by Nick Offerman, score by Flanagan’s go-to composers the Newton Brothers (Five Nights at Freddy’s), cinematography by Eben Bolter (The Last of Us).

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Absolutely. Come enjoy the softer side of King—again, if you’ve seen the likes of The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me. This film’s a Snuggie for the soul, a smile factory, a breathtaking piece of expansive-yet-contained storytelling. Opening with Act Three: Thanks Chuck is sure to feel jarring for some, but look at it as a sign that you’re in for some narrative wizardry that’ll reveal itself expeditiously. The movie trusts you; trust it in return and you’ll both be glad you did. In that opening section, the end-times for Mother Earth are explored on such a human, quotidian scale—we open on a classroom and segue into the type of parent/teacher conferences we never see, because these don’t warrant attention in onscreen apocalypses. “Pornhub’s down. Did you know that, Mr. Anderson? … Fuckin’ Pornhub,” a shell-shocked Dastmalchian tells Ejiofor. “What if that never comes back? Fuckin’ tragedy. I mean, even if it’s the end of all things…that’s just fucking mean.”

The second and third segments—continuing in reverse chronology, from Act Two: Buskers Forever to Act One: I Contain Multitudes—contain four or five dance sequences that are pure delights. Tom Hiddleston and Annalise Basso’s big moment (set to the Pocket Queen’s elite drumming) is the centerpiece, but a couple child actors give them a run for their money in the final number. (Pajak, the kid who inhabits Chuck the longest onscreen, is stellar.) Flanagan’s dialogue is always on point, and you’ll get dynamite monologues from Hamill and Lumbly (who both crushed it in House of Usher), Ejiofor, Lillard, and Siegel. It’s the proverbial embarrassment of riches. Every performer is used superbly, with the crown going to Ejiofor. The contrasting tones of each act follow each other gracefully, and while this is a true non-horror King outing, the scaremaster in Flanagan does expertly jump out for a second toward the end. 

Between my two viewings in theaters, there was clapping not only after the centerpiece dance number but during it, in rhythm. Viewers whooped when Chuck moonwalked; they burst out laughing when Offerman stolidly narrated King lines like “the weather is fucking gorgeous”; they wept openly as the credits rolled. Two small quibbles: 1) The music’s a little dialed-up, which doesn’t always fit, and whether its Truman Show-iness is a blessing or a curse is up to you. 2) Nobody’s throwing their phone on the ground and walking away from it in the apocalypse. We need our little games and our pictures and notes and stuff! What else do we have? Each other??

And, once more for emphasis, I’m just really really glad all these dance sequences exist and are here to nurture us through this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad period in history.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? This has to be a rhetorical question, right? You’ve either seen it or are in for the treat of your life, a type of Stephen King experience that’s never even remotely been brought to the screen. The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me are held up as the most warm and gooey (complimentary) of King cinema, but those feature a dead body, the loss of innocence, suicide, vicious bullying including sexual assault in prison, and often an air of the unsavory just out of frame. The Life of Chuck ditches traditional storytelling methods, has no bad guy menacing our characters, and embodies “get busy living or get busy dying” in a totally unique manner.

On a rewatch (or a much-warranted re-rewatch) of Chuck, the way characters and lines and ideas bleed into the other acts becomes less of an Easter egg hunt and more a surreal, stunningly stitched universe. The movie Cloud Atlas-ifies the recurring nature of these faces and places in a way that can only be done onscreen. (The scar on Chuck’s hand is, in a way, reminiscent of the comet-shaped birthmark seen on the half-dozen protagonists of David Mitchell’s classic novel.) You’ve also got Nick MFing Offerman reading tons of King text verbatim. He’s already a prolific audiobook narrator; can we get him to do a book by Uncle Stevie, please?

14 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY

1. The Life of Chuck was re-released as a standalone novella with a gorgeous cover in the spirit of the movie poster. King wrote a new foreword, which he also read in a video. The kicker: “In short, dear reader, it was a miracle that the story got written, a double miracle that such a strange piece of work should become a film, and a triple miracle that the film is such a splendid little gem.”

2. Chuck was the second of four Stephen King films to hit cinemas this year. The Monkey—also distributed by Neon—arrived in February; next up are the Richard Bachman adaptations The Long Walk on Sept. 12 and The Running Man on Nov. 7. As far as TV, The Institute just wrapped its eight-episode run on MGM+ and got renewed for season two. HBO’s It prequel series Welcome to Derry will premiere in October. King finds it “weird…that I’ve almost become a franchise, like Marvel or something,” per inveterate SK chronicler Anthony Breznican.

3. Preeminent Constant Reader pod The Kingcast has long been entwined with Mike Flanagan, who appeared multiple times in the show’s debut year to talk about 1408 and Hearts in Atlantis. He’s since done episodes on The Green Mile, The Shining, Dolores Claiborne, and—yes—The Life of Chuck, plus complete director’s commentaries for Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, as well as multiple live episodes.

Co-creators/hosts Eric Vespe and Scott Wampler appear as extras in the middle section of Chuck, in addition to their voice cameos as radio newscasters. The untimely and absolutely crushing death of Wampler—a journalist, Twitter oracle, inimitable wiseass, and great man—led Flanagan to dedicate the film to Scott. Poet/editor Kolleen Carney’s tweet shows the cameo, the “in memory of” credits moment, and just a lovely reminder that the Alamo Drafthouse now has a Scott Wampler Memorial Theater, plaque and all:

4. Flanagan’s Carrie miniseries for Prime Video (pitched to him by Amazon, for the record) is now shooting and will bring back The Life of Chuck actors Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle and Samantha Sloyan as the fanatical Margaret White, a flawless bit of casting for anyone familiar with her turn as Bev Keane in Midnight Mass. Also returning to the Flanaverse x Kingverse: Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Michael Trucco. Up-and-comer Summer Howell will play Carrie. Here are some thoughts from Flanagan on his rendition of King’s debut novel, published in 1974, adapted terrifically in ’76 by Brian De Palma, less successfully in 2002 and 2013:

“We’re having a great time, and I think we’re going to tell a story that will be surprising and impactful, very relevant to our modern society and to issues in our country. My oldest son is 14 years old, and I look at him as I’m working on this story, and think it’s important for his generation. I think there’ll be something in there that I hope will be useful to them in this world. … But it was a surprise to me as well that it emerged as a priority.” [MovieWeb, November 2024]

“I initially thought, ‘Why? It’s been done.’ And then I found an answer to that question, and it made me very excited. But when I went to Steve, his answer was ‘Why?’ His first response was, ‘Leave her alone. She’s been through enough.’ But it’s that thing where the more information I could share, and sending him the bible and the plan for the show, he could see the thing we were trying to do that was new. … I believe that in today’s modern world, the power of what it means to be a bully, the breadth of that and the impact of bullying, have changed a lot. The central tenets are still the same, but it’s about much more than Carrie White. … We’re not retelling the story as it’s been told, and we’re not making a show about telekinesis. It’s in there, but that’s not what it’s about. There’s a version of it where Carrie White carries a tragic superhero origin story that goes horribly wrong. I feel like they’ve done that, too. So we’re focused way more on the destruction of a community through these very modern tools.” [Variety, June 2025]

We won’t get into the soundbites we’ve gotten about The Dark Tower, since it might never happen (perish the thought!) and the updates are always brief and mysterious. But they are promising, and the world will be a better place with a sprawling Flanagan Tower project in it.

5. Multi-time Kingverse players here include Mark Hamill, who’ll be back in The Long Walk mere months after The Life of Chuck hit, plus David Dastmalchian (2023’s The Boogeyman), and Mia Sara (2006’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes). Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep featured Chucksters Jacob Tremblay, Carl Lumbly (as Dick Hallorann!), and Violet McGraw. Flanagan teased that Rose’s hat from Sleep would make “a special, subtle appearance” in Chuck, and it sure did, as Taylor’s “magic hat” for donations.

6. King, 77, and Hamill, 73, struck up an enchanting bromance at the 2024 TIFF premiere of Chuck, taking fun pics and going on to tweet at each other a bunch, repost one another on Bluesky, and generally sing the other’s praises.

Hamill’s Instagram right now looks like a combination Life of Chuck/Long Walk fanpage. What a time to be alive and a fan of these two.

7. Chuck’s got a bunch of instances of 19—the most magical of King numbers, particularly in The Dark Tower—in the first half-hour alone. It’s the start of winter break on Marty’s calendar, the sum of the digits on one TV station’s “please stand by” screen, and gets mentioned in the form of Route 19 and the number of Felicia’s home (seen and spoken). The last two came straight from King’s text.

8. Rita Hayworth—whose pinup poster is crucial in Shawshank and whose name is in the novella’s title—appears here twice in the form of a Cover Girl dance scene with Gene Kelly on TV.

9. A car similar to Christine—1958 Plymouth Fury, cherry red—is seen in traffic in Act One, a move also deployed in Cat’s Eye and In the Tall Grass.

10. Having a cupola and all, it makes sense the Krantz home is a Victorian. This is specifically remarked upon, and also specifically the type of home King fans have been photographing themselves in front of for decades.

11. Flanagan and Stephen King love a forbidden door—to the cupola in The Life of Chuck, to room 217/237 in The Shining, to the red room in Hill House, which inspired the name for Flanagan’s new production company.

12. A few key book-to-movie changes include a different approach to the Pornhub bit (yielding a soundtrack where track two is titled “Fuckin Porn Hub”), and the fact that young Chuck does some detective work in the story that gets him closer to already knowing what he’ll find in the cupola. Two of the finest monologues—Hamill tenderly outlining the beauty and necessity of math, Ejiofor divinely recapping Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar—are straight from the mind of Mike Flanagan.

13. Flanagan also wrote a script for 2014’s Revival which was by all accounts tremendous, but development at Warner Bros. was scrapped after Doctor Sleep underperformed at the box office. Here’s Mike: 

“It’s dark, but man did I love that script. When people ask me what the phantom limb is, what the project that got away is, it’ll always be Revival. … I’ve mourned for it ever since, but I do not have the rights to it. It went away. … There are other Stephen King properties that I am attached to that took precedence over that, and the choice was to pursue those or to try to get Revival going someplace else. We let it go, but I’ll always pine for that movie. Maybe it comes back around. You never know with these things.”

The writer/director/editor has also mused at various points about his desire to adapt The Stand, Pet Sematary, and Lisey’s Story, and he worked on a scrapped Dick Hallorann prequel feeding into both The Shining and It. His original series Midnight Mass in 2021 felt very much like a modernizing-and-combining of ’Salem’s Lot and Storm of the Century.

14. And since we are here on Decider.com, it’s prudent to share this Netflix-y bit from the novella:

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: 80% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 88 from audiences. The opening apocalyptic vibes were assessed by Bloody Disgusting’s Meagan Navarro as “timely, at least in the way humanity has largely grown complacent and apathetic in the face of constant catastrophe.” Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri—who found the film “unabashedly emotional and unexpectedly twisty”—guessed that anyone “with sense memories of real-life disasters—from 9/11 to the COVID pandemic—will recognize the human need to normalize despair and catastrophe, as will those who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about climate collapse.” IndieWire’s Katie Rife contended that The Life of Chuck “uses dancing as a shorthand for whimsy, creativity, playfulness, joy—name an unselfconscious emotion that we’re supposed to put aside in the name of adult responsibility, and it’s expressed through dancing in this movie.” The Atlantic’s Shirley Li “fell for the film’s earnest insistence that each of us has access to an inner world no one else can ever fully know,” adding that Chuck is “aligned with the rest of the author’s oeuvre because it illuminates the wonder and terror of being human: that to live means acknowledging that death approaches, that the multitudes we contain can’t last forever.” Matt Zoller Seitz wrote on RogerEbert.com that the flick “weaves its spell not merely by what it does, but how it moves, and what it chooses to say or not say, and when it decides to proceed to the next scene,” admiring how it “allows you to bring a lot of yourself to the work, which accounts for why it feels so warm and embracing overall, despite its formal gamesmanship.”

The New York Times’ Mahnola Dargis called Flanagan’s approach “unwisely faithful” and said Chuck himself exerts only “a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest.” Right here on Decider, Jesse Hassenger contended that “Flanagan’s fealty to King starts to clog the movie’s flow with reams of straight-from-the-text narration from Nick Offerman, indulging the worst tendencies of King’s folksy philosophizing.” He found the approach “both a touching act of fandom and a rejection of what makes the best adaptations soar.” The Big Picture’s Amanda Dobbins called Offerman’s narration “a disastrous choice” where the actor was “verging on audiobook.” Rolling Stone’s David Fear loved the big Hiddleston/Basso dance but bemoaned how Chuck “wants you to feel the sheer wonder of being alive, and it’s willing to beat this beatific idea into you over and over again just to ensure you get the emotional gist of it. This is the sort of uplifting parable about elevating the everyman that makes you leave the theater angry at being so gracelessly manipulated and jerked around.” The Toronto Star’s Adam Nayman found it all “extremely literal-minded, italicizing and underlining the connections between its various episodes in ways that are surely meant to be generous but come off as condescending,” noting that making “an authentically life-affirming crowd-pleaser requires some pretty fancy footwork, and director Mike Flanagan—a horror specialist crossing over into prestige-picture territory—alternates his steps frustratingly between clumsiness and grace.” 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “THE LIFE OF CHUCK” (2020): Debuted in King’s latest collection of four novellas, If It Bleeds, as the second (and shortest, and best) entry. Netflix’s Mr. Harrigan’s Phone in 2022 arose from the same book, to far weaker results. Bleeds arrived the year after The Institute and was followed in 2021 by Billy Summers and Later. “Chuck” went on to get its own standalone mini-hardcover in tandem with the movie, featuring a cute flipbook aspect that brings Tom Hiddleston’s dance to life.

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.