Stephen King has many registers but one of his most underrated might be described as surreal sentimentality – modern fairy tales that are most vibrant and dynamic when they remain on the cusp of horror but never quite give themselves over to it. While this tonality crops up quite often in his shorter works, it’s remarkably hard to translate to the big screen, partly because it is so indeterminate in terms of genre – should it be marketed as horror or as naturalism? Should it be targeted at adults or families? And to what extent should it be overtly branded as King at all? If anyone was going to take on this task in the present moment it would be Mike Flanagan, the greatest contemporary interpreter of King. Over the last decade, Flanagan has set his sights on some of the hardest works of King’s to adapt for cinema, including Doctor Sleep, which as a sequel to The Shining had to differentiate itself from Stanley Kubrick’s totalising vision, and Gerald’s Game, which takes place in its near entirety in a single room, and had long been considered unfilmable since its publication in 1992. This time around, Flanagan sets his eyes on The Life of Chuck, a 2020 novella that might be described as an apotheosis of King’s late work – and the result is quite wondrous.

One of the challenges, however, of describing The Life of Chuck is the experimental structure of the film itself, which takes place in three acts and moves from the third act back to the first act, such that it makes sense to discuss the film in reverse order, although that can’t quite do justice to its strange sense of emergence and ellipticality (you really have to wait until the last scene, or the first chronologically, to figure out what it’s all about). While all three acts revolve around the life of Chuck Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston as an adult, they’re quite tangentially linked, with the result that Flanagan’s film often resembles the great King anthology films of the 80s, such as Cat’s Eye and Creepshow, which in turn reflected the fecundity of King’s early short story collections. In many ways, the film is driven by rhythm more than narrative per se – from an early age, Chuck is an avid dancer, and his love of the dance drives each of the three acts, albeit in different ways. Surprisingly, Hiddleston is not in much of the film, his performance mainly consisting of an extended dance routine that comprises the third act, which we also see in the promotional material; he can’t have more than a page of dialogue across the entire two-hour running time. Instead, Nick Offerman’s voiceover provides narrative continuity, while ensuring that the film remains quite true to the text of King’s novella, which Flanagan uses liberally here.

In reverse order, then, “I Contain Multitudes,” the first act of the film, (presented last) introduces us to Chuck as a child, adolescent and young adult – he is played by Cody Flanagan at the age of seven, Benjamin Pajak at the age of eleven and Jacob Tremblay at the age of seventeen. Chuck has quite a sad story. His parents die when he is a young child, so he moves in with his grandparents, played by Mia Sara and Mike Hamill. His grandmother, played by Sara, encourages his love of dancing; she often grooves in the kitchen to Wang Chung and inspires him to give up sport and join the “Twirlers and Spinners” dance troupe at school, where he is an instant success and even teaches the other students to Moonwalk. Then, Sara abruptly dies, and Chuck is left alone with his grandfather, played by Hamill, who suggests he give up his dreams of dancing and become an accountant, since the maths dictate that his chances of making a career out of his passion are immensely unlikely. This scene in the film is doubly poignant – first because Chuck’s grandfather genuinely thinks he is doing him a favour and second because he doesn’t realise that Chuck may well be that once in a generation talent. By this stage, anyone else who might have mentored Chuck at home has died, and when his grandfather dies too, Chuck decides to take his advice.

Interestingly, this is not presented as straight tragedy or as a mere exercise in trauma. Instead, it feels like King reflecting on what his own life might have been, in what ways it might have been compressed, and in what ways it might still have retained its cosmic majesty, if he hadn’t been a writer – if, like Chuck, he didn’t have a Tabitha to insist he get the first draft of Carrie out of the wastepaper basket. For there is a pervasive sense, even in the saddest scenes, that Chuck’s life, like everyone’s life, has a cosmic significance that transcends his individual pitfalls. In a thesis that feels poignantly attuned to the lowered expectations of contemporary America, the lowering of the nation’s aspirational ceiling, King suggests that most people don’t reach their potential but that this doesn’t make their potential any less grand. Time and again, the film refers to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, its sense of the self as “containing multitudes” and this essential, very American optimism, subtends the pervasive sense of the “late world” in both America and King’s own oeuvre.

This brings us to the centerpiece of the first act and of Chuck’s grandparents’ house – a cupola inhabited by ghosts, which dates to the original Victorian core of the building, which was constructed in 1885. From a young age, Chuck’s grandfather prohibits him from entering this quintessential American Gothic space, but it is only when Chuck has lost him, along with the rest of his family, that he realises why. Upon entering the cupola for the first and last time, he has a vision of himself, lying upon a sickbed as a relatively young man, and realises that this room allows certain people to see future deaths, in precisely the horror-adjacency that characterizes King’s best exercises in surreal sentimentality. And this register remains adjacent, rather than horrific per se, for although Chuck, as a teenager, realises that he destined to die young, there is no sense of hauntolgy here, no hauntedness in the face of lost futures. Instead, King’s approach is defiantly anti-hauntological, as Chuck’s foreclosed future becomes a pretext for joy: “I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful. I deserve to be wonderful.” There’s a quiet but real profundity to this moment and message.

This brings us to the second act of the film, “Buskers Forever,” and the only one in which Hiddleston appears in any sustained way. This is also the scene where Offerman’s voiceover (and King’s text) does the most heavy lifting, introducing us to Taylor Franck, a busking drummer played by Taylor Gordon. It seems like a normal day for Taylor until Chuck, who is attending a banking conference, gets carried away by her rhythm and launches into the dance routine that becomes the emotional centerpiece of the film. So long is this sequence that Chuck is joined by Janice Halliday, a young woman played by Annalise Basso, who has just been dumped, and the three of them spend the rest of the afternoon together, splitting the busking proceeds as they walk through the dusk. Upon introducing adult Chuck, Offerman’s narrator notes that “his life is narrower than the one he’d hoped for but he accepts that – he understandings that narrowing is the natural order of things.” Breaking out into dance is a moment of joy, a recognition of his cosmic potential, and the remarkable thing about this sequence is that the joy dominates the sadness, even if the increasingly manic quality of the dancing shifts us back into horror-adjacency again; it is during the dancing that Chuck has his first headache, the first symptom of the terminal condition that a mere nine months later will send him into palliative care and the final days of his existence.

These final days preoccupy the third act, “Thanks Chuck,” which we see first, and whose meaning only becomes clear in hindsight. Chuck only appears elliptically in this act, which otherwise plays as King’s take on an impending climate apocalypse. We witness this apocalypse from the perspective of Marty Anderson, a middle school teacher played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. While we’ve seen many catastrophic climate vision in recent years, this act is unique in the way it presents a quiet apocalypse, disastrous no doubt but also gradual, ambient and dispersed. Slowly, the fabric of society disintegrates around Marty: absenteeism from school is on the rise, suicides are also increasing, and there is debate as to whether more people are getting married or having divorces. Likewise, communication networks are breaking down – cable television, mobile phones, heart monitors, and everything that depends upon global digital technology is gradually coming to a standstill. In the background, massive geomorphological changes are taking place across the American continent; the film opens with Marty giving a lesson on Whitman that is interrupted by a news alert that half of northern California has tumbled into the sea. Interrupted, but only briefly, since crisis has become utterly normalised on the cusp of utter global destruction. The end of things prompts Marty to get in touch with his ex-girlfriend Felicia Gordon, played by Karen Gillan, and it quickly absorbs all the residual crisis of their relationship breakdown too. He asks how her day was, she asks how his day was, and just like that they’re back in (muted) contact again, discussing the world briefly before he goes back to marking papers.

For me, the most powerful and pregnant scene of the whole film occurs during this first act. It takes place outside Marty’s house, where he discusses the apocalypse with his neighbour Gus Wilfong, played by Matthew Lillard: “I think the suicides will slow down. People will just wait.” “For what?” “The end.” As they chat, a woman walks slowly up the street, followed by a man, another woman, and then a steady stream of people, who have been forced to abandon their cars due to a sinkhole opening in the centre of town. “They look like refugees,” Gus observes, as one of them drops his briefcase on the ground and keeps moving. This is also the moment when the internet finally goes down for good, bringing residents out onto their lawns in an effort to final a phone signal. There’s such power in the way this scene brings crisis into the realm of the suburban familiar, not unlike the way that 50s cinema often alternated between suburban melodrama and science fiction; the sense that there was a radically alterior world just outside your front door (and there is a touch of mid-century peppiness to King’s vision of Chuck’s childhood in particular, despite it being set in the 80s). But the most enduring element of this sequence is its sheer exhaustion, its taxonomy of a new set of body languages and haptic postures proportionate to climate tiredness – and, at a second remove, to the tiredness of climate change discourse, at once ambient and urgent, demanding of action but seeming to preclude individual agency.

Although society seems to be breaking down, one media message is staying strong – tributes pour in to “Chuck,” an apparently beloved local radio host, although neither Marty nor anyone else in his inner circle seems to remember him or know who he is. Chuck, it seems, is finally retiring, after thirty-nine years, and his presence grows more uncanny and horror-adjacent as the third act draws to its close. Marty’s final refuge, as the world finally goes to sleep, is Harvest Acres, an idyllic housing estate on the fringes of town, where he meets up with Felicia and watches the stars, only for the windows of every house to light up with holographic tributes to Chuck’s career. Only with the hindsight of the first two acts do we realise that this entire act is a hallucination, the dissociating visions of Chuck’s mind as he lies in palliative care after thirty-nine years of life, suffused with images and motifs that turn out to recall actual images and objects from the “real” life that we see in “Buskers Forever” and “I Contain Multitudes.” There’s a poignant juxtaposition between Harvest Acres, the cosiest and safest of American suburban spaces, and the premature deterioration of Chuck’s mind, and the middle ground between them, the strangely calming but also awe-inspiring nature of King’s climate apocalypse, remains the final note of the film, despite coming first. In the end, then, The Life of Chuck is an affirmation that we can accept foreclosure without succumbing to hauntology, and an invocation to see lost futures as a celebration of our cosmic potentiality, rather than our corporeal and material limitations. And that’s a quietly profound, possibly life-changing message, in an America, and a world, where so very much seems uncertain, where the future itself, as category, can no longer mean what it once did.