The Life of Chuck
POSTED: October 19, 2025
We went to see The Life of Chuck yesterday at the cinema in Itis. I liked it a lot, despite the fact that it adapted a Stephen King novella. The film has a reversed-chronology structure, and comes in three acts. It does not aspire to ape something like Time’s Arrow. The acts all work in a normal chronology. However Act 1 takes place towards the end of Chuck’s life, the second act concerns an event in the middle of his life, and the third act depicts key elements in his childhood. Thus the events in the first act appear bizarre and mysterious because we do not yet have the means to understand what we can see.
Afterwards I discovered that some controversy existed about how “real” we should find the events in the first act. Did they “really” happen or not? This surprised me because the final act (when we see him as a child) contains all sorts of pointers, including direct quotations from Leaves of Grass about people containing multitudes, and a teacher explaining to Chuck what this means!
Nonetheless audiences apparently left the cinema baffled. If anyone wants/needs an explanation, you can find one here.
Warning: if you haven’t seen the movie and think you might at some point, don’t click the link. It contains nothing but SPOILERS…