The first teaser for Neon’s The Life of Chuck was released today and, while short, it gives off Truman Show vibes. It opens with an image of two people holding hands, then a sound that resembles a ticking clock, a blinking yellow stoplight and Tom Hiddleston’s Charles “Chuck” Kranz walking through a modern, Main Street-type setting before a voiceover (Nick Offerman) paraphrasing Walt Whitman intones, “The universe contains multitudes, but it also contains … me.” Watch above.
Director Mike Flanagan’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award winner is based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King — one of the four in his 2020 novella If It Bleeds. The Life of Chuck is, rather than straight-out horror, a story of human mortality presented as a strange, surrealist comedy.
It’s a different take for casual fans of King, and also a bit of departure for writer/director/editor/producer Flanagan, who is best known for horror films like Absentia, Oculus, Hush, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Gerald’s Game (also a King adaptation) and Doctor Sleep (likewise).
To that end, the trailer touts King not as the progenitor of page-to-screen horror classics such as Carrie, It and Children of the Corn, but as the author of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and Stand By Me.
Like those latter film adaptations of King’s work, Deadline’s Damon Wise sees the potential for cult longevity in his review of Chuck out of Toronto: “Staying pretty faithful to King’s original text, Flanagan’s film is, likewise, a story of life rather than death, a kind of pop-culture version of Lars Von Trier’s 2011 end-of-the-world movie Melancholia. Its darkness might be an obstacle to immediate commercial success, but its underlying warmth and poignancy could well be its secret weapon on the way to cult longevity.”
In addition to Hiddleston, the film features Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Matthew Lillard, Mia Sara, Carl Lumbly, Flanagan’s wife Kate Siegel, Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, Mark Hamill and Heather Langenkamp.
Here is the new teaser poster:
Neon
Content shared from deadline.com.