“The Life of Chuck” is a trick. It’s a trick you’ll be delighted by, but a trick nevertheless, conjured by author Stephen King, on the page, and filmmaker Mike Flanagan, on screen. Of course, if you’ve read the source material, a novella published in 2020 as part of the collection “If It Bleeds,” you’ll know what’s afoot, as Flanagan doesn’t stray from King’s structural play or themes. But if you go in fresh, with wide eyes and an open heart, it’s like watching a bubble grow bigger and bigger, before it pops, suddenly, with a sense of surprise and wonder.

Attempting to maintain that sense of surprise for a viewer makes the film extraordinarily difficult to write about, even though it’s a film about an ordinary life, and the ways that all ordinary lives are, in their own ways, extraordinary. It’s extremely apt that one 2025 King adaptation, “The Monkey,” by Oz Perkins, is about accepting death, in all of its randomness and horror, while the other, “The Life of Chuck,” is about finding the meaning and joy in life.

These two films represent the multitudes contained in King’s work, the yin and yang of his point of view: that the sweetness of life that can only be appreciated with the inevitability of death. And because this is King, the sentimental message of “The Life of Chuck” is wrapped in an existentially unsettling narrative.

“The Life of Chuck” is presented in three acts, “I Contain Multitudes,” “Buskers Forever,” and “Thanks Chuck.” Throughout, we get to know Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) who starts out as a man of mystery. During a period of apocalyptic turmoil, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher, and his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse, are befuddled by the proliferation of numerous billboards, advertisements and TV ads thanking Charles Krantz — Chuck — for 39 great years. In a time of cosmically terrifying strife, these sunny messages are a strange anomaly that both distract from, and call attention to, the crumbling of society around them. It’s something to focus on other than the horrors.

This act, “Thanks Chuck,” is rattling. What Marty and Felicia and everyone around them are experiencing is the kind of slow-moving apocalypse that feels all too familiar. It’s the mundanities, the small indignities, and the sheer weirdness of the universe rending itself apart that impacts their lives the most: the traffic, the internet being down for months, the suicides. That it comes first is crucial because it casts a pall over the proceedings, even as the rest of the film soothes the nervous system.

What Flanagan — and King — do is a sort of slow sleight of hand that mimics the emotional journey of Charles Krantz. If you know the world is going to end, how do you live your life? Do you dance in a town square to the beat of a busker drumming, pulling in a dance partner and putting on a show, the way Chuck does? Or do you let the worry and pain of knowing that it’s all going to end someday eat you alive?

"Chuck" argues that knowledge is a life-affirming power, while in its evil twin, “The Monkey,” it was the not knowing that caused the characters so much anguish. Knowing empowers us to live more, brighter, bigger, to embrace every single one of our multitudes, whether it’s dance or math, or whatever makes us feel alive.

This is the lesson that Chuck learns while he’s growing up (played over the years by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay). Like many a King child protagonist, he is all-too familiar with death, having lost his parents in a car wreck. Grief takes over the life of Chuck and his grandparents until one day his grandmother (Mia Sara) decides to cast it off. She teaches Chuck to dance in the kitchen, and shows him movie musicals. After her sudden death, he joins the “Twirlers and Spinners” at school, developing his skills, and more importantly, the gumption it takes to get up and dance.

So is “The Life of Chuck” a movie about the power of dance? Kind of. But it’s also so much more than that. It contains multitudes, after all, just like Chuck, and just like every person walking this earth — little galaxies and universes of people and stories and memories unto themselves. Flanagan’s trick is simply how he imparts this eternal lesson to us: we know life will end, so how you spend the time is all that matters. It’s simple, and it may be delivered in a way that’s a bit too clever by half, but it’s still a gut-punch, and a message worth absorbing now, and always.

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'THE LIFE OF CHUCK'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:50

How to watch: In theaters June 6

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