Mike Flanagan adapts Stephen King's novella "The Life of Chuck" — from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds — into a film of staggering emotional scale and strange, tender beauty. The story unfolds in three acts presented in reverse chronological order, each moving closer to the beginning of a life that, when the film opens, the audience already knows is approaching its end. Tom Hiddleston plays Charles Krantz — "Chuck" — whose life the film traces backward from professional adulthood through middle age to a transcendent moment of childhood. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan, and a vast ensemble populate a world that is simultaneously realistic and quietly mystical.

Flanagan — best known for his Netflix horror output including The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher — demonstrates here that the darkness he is celebrated for is the shadow cast by his investment in the light. The Life of Chuck is, at its core, a celebration of individual human existence: the argument that one ordinary life, fully lived, contains more wonder than the universe gives us credit for. King's novella is among his most personal works, and Flanagan's adaptation honors both its mystery and warmth. The reverse structure becomes the film's most affecting device — understanding what was lost before learning what it once was.

The Life of Chuck won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival — the prize previously won by films that went on to win Best Picture — and arrived in theaters to near-universal acclaim. It has been compared to Forrest Gump and Big Fish as a work of magical realism that takes human mortality seriously without surrendering to despair. The result is among the most purely moving films of the decade: an experience that asks you to hold contradictory things at once and finds that the heart is large enough to do so.