Has the day arrived when we can watch new Tom Hiddleston projects without joking about Loki variants?

Stephen King is large! He contains multitudes! Your elderly parents’ dismissal of him notwithstanding, he hasn’t been “just” The King of Horror since at least the mid-’80s, though it can be hard to keep in mind considering the King-based film majority. Whenever one of his 60,000 works are adapted into something other than a zero-budget splatterpunk B-movie or modestly funded “elevated horror” streamer-filler, the trailers will always caution, “No, hey, don’t make that face, it’s cool, we promise this isn’t the Stephen King of Sleepwalkers or Maximum Overdrive or The Lawnmower Man! This is the OTHER Stephen King! Y’know, the one who single-handedly kept the basic-cable industry alive with looping reruns of Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption!”

That Stephen King returns with a semi-fantasy of bittersweet lyricism in The Life of Chuck, whose box-office figures have been grim, yet might hopefully earn a home-video renaissance in its next medium, where it doesn’t have to compete against the bigger studios’ re-nuked kiddie leftovers. Alas, today’s theaters can only contain up to 1.5 multitudes at a time.

Once again King benefits from an adapter who’s in sync with his strengths and who has the honed skills to realize a proper transmedia upgrade. Writer/director Mike Flanagan has drawn critical acclaim for his various spooky Netflix miniseries (most recently, his stunning Poe-geek homage Fall of the House of Usher) and scored with King features twice before. His ambitious version of Doctor Sleep dared to diverge from King-canon by sequelizing both competing versions of The Shining — the early alcoholic-era novel as well as Stanley Kubrick’s iconic yet differently maddened overhaul. And I only recently (i.e., the day after I saw Life of Chuck) plumbed my deep Netflix queue to pluck out Gerald’s Game, a bottle-episodic survival-horror standoff between future Usher opponents Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood with a surprising emotional wallop at the end. It’s been a while since I read the book back in college, but I don’t recall it hitting me quite so hard.

With Chuck Flanagan switches gears to explore King’s non-horror side, inviting several of his repertory players along while welcoming new faces to his stage. Same as the original novella, Chuck has a three-act structure, told in reverse order, but for the sake of an understated emotional elegance rather than for Nolan-esque experimentation or a Charlie Kaufman mind game. Technically the eponymous hero of the piece is TV’s Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, but physically he’s in less than half the film.

He’s central in every sense in Act Two as a seemingly ordinary accountant who one day stops in the middle of an outdoor mall, finds himself entranced by a versatile street drummer (musician Taylor Gordon), and breaks out in an extended dance number that further escalates when he invites a random onlooker to be his onetime partner (Annalise Basso, from Flanagan’s Oculus and TNT’s Snowpiercer). Apart from certain subtleties, that’s it, that’s the entire act. Live-action dance numbers without cartoon animals are such a cinematic rarity anymore that perhaps it’s extremely easy to be wowed as three perfect strangers share a spontaneous moment at length, switching up styles and rhythms with dexterous aplomb. Speaking as someone who’s never viewed a single frame of a TV dance contest since Deney Terrio left Dance Fever, I was enthralled.

Chuck‘s core is joyous enough out of context and on its own merits (I’d give it a thumbs-up as a short, really), but of course the dots do need connecting. The lead-off Act Three chronicles nothing less than the end of the world. Natural catastrophes have formed an international revenge squad and are striking various targets at random. California falls apart in chunks! Wildfires scour Ohio! Worst of all: the internet ceases! Entirely! DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER! MASS HYSTERIA! (There’s a single line of token snark toward “right-wing nutjobs”, but Flanagan’s brainstorming list is too varied to peg climate change as the Big Bad. When a star in the night sky blinks out of existence light-years away with an impossibly instant sound effect…suffice it to say something else is going on.)

The apocalypse is witnessed through the eyes of two fellow Marvel veterans: the always passionate Chiwetel Ejiofor (with a resume ranging from 12 Years a Slave to the previous apocalypse of Emmerich’s 2012) as a schoolteacher whose parent conferences are understandably going nowhere; and Karen Gillan (Oculus, Doctor Who, etc.) as a nurse determined to do the job as long as patients keep bothering to show up. As society collapses and each everyday act feels increasingly pointless, separately they search for meaning in the remaining surroundings…punctuated by a bewildering motif: ads in every medium (TV! radio! park benches) proclaiming “Thanks for 39 Years, Chuck Krantz!” with a photo of a bespectacled Hiddleston and no other context. Who’s Chuck? What’s a Chuck? Why Chuck? The ubiquitous enigma (“our last meme”, jokes Ejiofor) is like the second coming of Gabbo, everywhere and nobody all at once.

Act One, the lengthy finale, is The Secret Origin of Chuck. Newcomer Benjamin Pajak is middle-school Chuck, being raised by his grandparents Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the original Birds of Prey) and former spaceman Mark Hamill (Usher, The Wild Robot). Li’l Chuck’s is the sort of coming-of-age tale that is among King’s less bloody specialties, with the requisite misfit awkwardness but a lower body count than usual. Grandma is a ball of fun, but Grandpa is a grumpy accountant who shows a spark exactly once: when Our Hero contemplates chasing his dreams and dares talk trash about math, Hamill extols its virtues with a pastor’s fervor, wide-eyed in admiring the beauty in math’s objective certainty and the wonder of the universe’s perfectly ordered construction and each celestial body’s exactly charted path. My Flanagan experience is far from complete, but I’ve already come to appreciate his knack for sincere monologues from unexpected speakers.

In an ordinary film Li’l Chuck’s tale would’ve naturally been told up front, but Flanagan writes a cleverer pop quiz for us as he defines all remaining variables and invites the viewer to go back and solve the equation of Chuck on their own. Chuck’s childhood encompasses family tragedy, extracurricular activity, cringey school dances, Carl Sagan, “Song of Myself”, a Room That Must Never Be Entered, puppy love, weird secrets, life lessons, and just enough English class to get by — the latter inserted via yet another monologue, this one from Flanagan’s wife and muse Kate Siegel. The talented youngster Pajak elicits our sympathy and hope as an expressive mini-Hiddleston with a similarly flexible physicality and eyes just Spielbergian enough that we fully buy into his exploration of the fringes around him and anticipate his eventual courage for self-expression.

All three acts are wrapped in portions of King’s original text as narrated by Nick Offerman in a gentle “Ron Swanson goes to Lake Woebegon” lilt. Some of it’s redundant with what we’re already watching happen, but King’s prose is like a cozy old friend I’m happy to hear. And maybe some viewers do need the reinforcement, judging by what happened with our lightly attended screening. As the last secret is revealed and the final decision is made — at the intersection of math and dance, not so much a debate as a search for their common ground, which can be a sort of conceptual beauty in itself — Flanagan’s work is done and the credits roll. to which several younger audience members in the front and back of our theater all burst out laughing in separate, incredulous fits of “Wait, that’s IT? REALLY?”

Like all the best teachers, Flanagan doesn’t need to show us the answer key. With a fatalistically inspiring end-of-the-world romanticism (what would matter to you in the minutes remaining?) and faint echoes of Synecdoche, New York, he provides all the clues for What’s Really Going On, telegraphing the necessary data sets well before the end. Viewers who need cheat-sheets should be a little more thoughtful rather than protest, “I understood there would be no math!”

And yet The Life of Chuck avoids common movie-formula calculations as it reveals its poet’s heart and wraps its arms around the full scope of a singular human and the potential richness of every inner life. Each of us is a universe that reaches from whatever’s in our faces right now to the dormant ghosts that keep resonating within, even when we’re not thinking about them.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Jacob Tremblay (Doctor Sleep, Room) wraps up Act One as older-teen Chuck. Other Flanagan veterans include Carl Lumbly (Usher, Doctor Sleep, Captain America 4) as an overworked mortician, Samantha Sloyan (nearly all Flanagan’s shows, Max’s The Pitt) as a dance teacher, Rahul Kohli (nearly all Flanagan’s shows, iZombie) as Gillan’s coworker, Molly C. Quinn (Usher, Doctor Sleep) as Chuck’s mom, Michael Trucco (Midnight Mass, Battlestar Galactica) as Chuck’s dad, and mass-media cameos by Hamish Linklater (Midnight Mass, Nickel Boys) and the aforementioned Carla Gugino.

(The fiercely loyal Mike Flanagan Repertory Players are large. They contain multitudes.)

Ejiofor’s neighbors include Matthew Lillard (Scream, Scooby-Doo) and A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Heather Langenkamp. His after-school visitors include David Dastmalchian (The Suicide Squad, Apple’s Murderbot, etc. x100) and Harvey Guillen (What We Do in the Shadows, the recent Companion).

Chuck’s family also includes Q’orianka Kilcher (The New World, Yellowstone). Childhood acquaintances include Trinity Bliss, one of the main kids from Avatar: The Way of Water. Violet McGraw (the MCU’s Young Yelena; M3GAN) is a skater girl.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Life of Chuck end credits, but they commence with a message: “In Memory of Scott Wampler” — a tribute to the late film commentator and co-host of The Kingcast podcast about all things Stephen King. Wampler recorded an audio cameo for this before he passed away last year at 40, which is a cruelly low number. I’m a mere silent lurker amid Film Twitter, but I saw him frequently retweeted and definitely noticed the heartfelt tributes. R.I.P.