Tom Hiddleston in Mike Flanagan's film

It's no surprise that horror maestro Mike Flanagan has a soft spot for Stephen King, having successfully adapted Gerald's Game AND Doctor Sleep for the big screen. But his latest attempt with King, the genre that deforms Chuck's Lifemakes it a little weird, if less fitting.

An optimistic take on the end of days, unfolding in reverse chronological order, the eccentric tale appeared in King's 2020 collection If it bleedsFlanagan, who was sent an advance copy at the start of the COVID lockdown, was deeply moved by the underlying message: learning to cherish precious moments in the face of adversity.

But while the resulting film, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival with the author in attendance, offers edifying goods, it does so at the cost of an initially darkly intriguing premise that becomes more diluted and precarious as it progresses—or, in this case, backwards. The end result offers unexpected twists like a dancing Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill as a Jewish zayde (grandfather), Flanagan's die-hard fan base may prefer to wait for his planned performance of The Exorcist franchising.

The film’s existential third act, which introduces the film, finds the world in a dystopian morass of natural and man-made disasters, including a devastating 9.1-magnitude earthquake in California that has caused the state to “crumble like old wallpaper,” wildfires in Ohio, widespread flooding in Europe, and a volcano in Germany, not to mention a shaky Internet that threatens to disappear forever at any moment.

A stoic teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his exhausted nurse ex-wife (Karen Gillan) try to cope as best they can with their rapidly approaching end. The couple is also trying to make sense of all the mysterious “Thanks, Chuck!” billboards, signs and TV commercials that are popping up everywhere, featuring the gentle face of one Charles Krantz (Hiddleston), congratulating him on a fantastic 39 years.

Flanagan establishes an effective eeriness masked as terror here, coupled with a touch of satire that wouldn't be out of place in a Wes Anderson production, setting the stage for a well-earned closing jolt to the act. Rewinding the clock, the second act reveals the mysterious Chuck Krantz to be a bank clerk who, in the words of narrator Nick Offerman, “does the armor of accounting” but who goes all Christopher Walken in the iconic “Weapon of Choice” video and launches into a heavily choreographed dance sequence with bystander Annalise Basso to the propulsive beats of a street musician (The Pocket Queen).

With Hiddleston giving it his all, the sequence, while seemingly out of place, can't help but capture attention.

Then, alas, we move into the much longer first act, which presents Krantz's backstory in a decidedly Spielbergian framework: he was raised as a young man (Jacob Tremblay) by his grandparents (Mia Sara and Hamill, giving a brilliant Richard Dreyfuss performance), discovering his love of dance and determined to find out why there's a lock on the dome door of their Victorian home.

It is, by all accounts, the weakest of the three acts; the more it reveals, the less that remains of what makes the rest special. Flanagan, as demonstrated in his Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House AND Midnight Massexcels at creating an eerie atmosphere and mood that ties together each episode. Here, devoid of tonal connective tissue, Chuck's Life It may still leave behind the desired effect, cheerful and compelling, but in the end it proves ephemeral, transitory like the apparitions that usually haunt Flanagan's most powerful ghost stories.