Tom Hiddleston in Mike Flanagan Film

It comes as no shock that reigning scare-meister Mike Flanagan has a tender spot for Stephen King, having efficiently tailored Gerald’s Sport and Physician Sleep for the large display. However his newest stab at King, the genre-warping The Lifetime of Chuck, makes for an oddball if much less very best match.

A hopeful tackle the tip of days, unfolding in reverse chronological order, the quirky novella appeared in King’s 2020 assortment If It Bleeds. Flanagan, who had been despatched an advance copy on the onset of the COVID lockdown, was deeply moved by the underlying message of studying to carry onto valuable moments within the face of adversity.

However though the ensuing function, which held its world premiere on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition with the creator in attendance, delivers the uplifting items, it does so at the price of an initially darkly intriguing premise that grows extra diluted and precarious because it strikes alongside — or, backward on this case. The top end result provides up such surprising developments as a dancing Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill as a Jewish zayde (grandpa), Flanagan’s rabid fan base may want to attend for his deliberate tackle The Exorcist franchise.

The existential third act, which units up the movie, finds the world in a dystopian quagmire of pure and man-made catastrophes — amongst them a devastating 9.1 magnitude California quake ensuing within the state “peeling away like outdated wallpaper,” Ohio wildfires, widespread flooding in Europe and a volcano in Germany, to not point out a wobbly Web that’s threatening to vanish completely at any given second.

Coping as greatest they’ll with the quickly impending doom are a stoic schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife, an exhausted nurse (Karen Gillan). The couple are additionally making an attempt to make sense of all of the mysterious “Thanks Chuck!” billboards, indicators and TV adverts popping up in all places displaying the mild-mannered face of 1 Charles Krantz (Hiddleston), congratulating him on 39 nice years.

Flanagan establishes an efficient dread-cloaked eeriness right here, mixed with a contact of satire that wouldn’t be misplaced in a Wes Anderson manufacturing, setting the stage for a well-earned gasp of an act-closer. Shifting again in time, the second act reveals the mysterious Chuck Krantz to be a financial institution worker, who, within the phrases of narrator Nick Offerman, “is dressed within the armor of accounting” however who makes like Christopher Walken within the iconic “Weapon of Selection” video and breaks right into a heavily-choreographed dance sequence with passer-by Annalise Basso to the propulsive drumbeats of a busker (The Pocket Queen).

With a recreation Hiddleston giving it his all, the sequence, nonetheless seemingly misplaced, can’t assist however captivate.

Then, alas, we transfer onto the for much longer first act, which presents Krantz’s backstory in a decidedly Spielbergian framework: He was raised as a younger man (Jacob Tremblay) by his grandparents (Mia Sara and Hamill, doing his greatest Richard Dreyfuss), discovering his love of dance and decided to search out out why there’s a padlock on the door to their Victorian residence’s cupola.

It’s by each measure the weakest of the three acts; the extra that’s revealed the much less stays that makes the remainder particular. Flanagan, as demonstrated in his Netflix collection The Haunting of Hill Home and Midnight Mass, excels in creating an unsettling temper and ambiance that bridges every episode. Right here, missing in tonal connective tissue, The Lifetime of Chuck should depart in its wake the specified upbeat, life-hugging impact, nevertheless it finally proves to be an ephemeral one — as transitory because the apparitions who often hang-out Flanagan’s stronger ghost tales.