The Life of Chuck: A Beautifully Layered Meditation on Living Fully

I watched The Life of Chuck at TIFF, and it left me quiet for a while after the credits rolled. There’s something rare about a film that plays with time and structure but still manages to hit you in the heart. Based on an unpublished novella by Stephen King, this adaptation is a soulful, musical, and subtly emotional journey. Directed with sensitivity and care, it unfolds like a three-part symphony with each chapter deepening the story, the mystery, and eventually, the meaning of Chuck’s life.

The film opens in a surreal world, apocalyptic in tone. The sky is breaking. Technology is failing. Cities are shutting down. News anchors report the end of everything. But amid all this collapse, people across the world are talking about one person, Charles Krantz, and thanking him for a great 39 years. His face appears on billboards. A school is renamed in his honor. Everyone seems to know who he is. The question that keeps you hooked is who exactly is Chuck and why does the entire world seem to owe him something.

At first, it feels like a sci-fi mystery. Time and space bend. Clocks spin backward. The use of light and sound gives the first act a scale that rivals blockbuster disaster films. But unlike most end-of-the-world stories, this one does not build toward destruction. It starts there. Slowly, you realize that the collapse of the world is not what it seems. The truth is more intimate and haunting.

Act Two shifts gears completely. Here we meet Chuck in a more grounded world. He is played with remarkable restraint and warmth by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck is a quiet accountant. He passes a woman playing drums on the street, clearly struggling to get anyone’s attention. In a moment that is both gentle and liberating, he starts dancing, not perfectly but joyfully, drawing a crowd, helping her make money, and sharing a piece of himself without needing anything back.

The narration quietly lets us in on something deeper. Chuck has only nine months left to live. It is never stated how he knows, and he never discusses it with anyone, but the way he moves through the world suggests a quiet awareness of what is coming. That subtle, unspoken knowledge seems to explain why, when the woman excitedly proposes they perform together again, he smiles but gently declines. He is grateful for the moment, but he knows his time is limited. He chooses presence over planning. This middle act brings in familiar faces from the apocalyptic first act, placing them in this quieter, more emotional world. You begin to connect the dots, even though the film never rushes to explain. Instead, it lets feeling lead the way. There is grief here, but also playfulness. You feel the weight of finality but also the lightness of someone who has decided to live well, no matter the countdown.

The third chapter, titled I Contain Multitudes, is the soul of the movie. It takes us into Chuck’s past, his childhood, teenage years, and the relationships that shaped him. After losing his parents, he is raised by his grandparents in a house with a cupola on the roof that becomes a symbol of both dread and comfort. We see a young Chuck learning to dance with his grandmother in the kitchen and being taught accounting by his grandfather. These two passions, numbers and rhythm, shape him more deeply than we realize at first.The accounting and the dancing suddenly make sense. His life was never about either extreme. It was always about balance. Precision and creativity. Duty and joy. The ordinary and the mystical.

The background score in this act is calming, almost meditative. The school sequences and dance scenes exude a strong sense of nostalgia, filled with warmth and longing. There is a beautiful sincerity in the screenplay, especially in the scenes with the children. The acting by the kids is heartfelt and grounded, giving weight to the early influences in Chuck’s life. His connection to the cupola becomes one of the most powerful emotional revelations in the film when he foresees his own death and it lands like a suspenseful climax. The moment feels inevitable yet deeply personal, as if we’ve been holding our breath alongside him the entire time.

There is a line near the end that lingers long after: “Live your life until life runs out.” Spoken softly over a sequence of Chuck simply being, walking, laughing, dancing, helping, remembering, it sums up what the movie is really about. Not death, not mystery, not even identity. It is about presence. It is about living. Fully, honestly, and with gratitude for the fleeting time we get.

The narration that weaves through this final act brings everything together. It is not heavy-handed or overly poetic. It just helps you see the thread you might have missed. Chuck’s life, like all of ours, was made of small, seemingly disconnected moments that meant everything in the end. and here is where the film reveals its quiet genius. In Act Three, you begin to realize that the world-ending imagery from Act One was not literal at all. It was not the universe collapsing, but Chuck’s mind letting go. Those flashes of destruction, the breakdown of order and time, were a visual representation of his consciousness fading. It was connected to what he learned as a child, about how each person carries their own universe within. His memories, his relationships, and his imagination were all part of that inner cosmos. As his life comes to a close, his world ends because it was his world all along.

The film does not state this aloud, but it does not need to. It leaves you with the quiet understanding that your universe is in your mind. And when that mind lets go, the world around it fades too.

The Life of Chuck is not a conventional film. It does not stick to genre rules or linear logic. It is a story told backwards and inside out, and yet it leaves you feeling more whole than broken. The cinematography is elegant. The performances are understated but affecting. The soundtrack is tender, reflective, and sometimes whimsical, perfectly complementing the emotional landscape.

Watching this film at TIFF felt like discovering a hidden gem. One that does not shout for attention but invites you quietly into its world, into Chuck’s world. And once you are there, you do not want to leave. Not because it is perfect, but because it reminds you that you do not have to be. You just have to be here. Now. For as long as you can.