A TREACLY MESS

No one talks like a human in Mike Flanagan's ambitious but confused 'The Life of Chuck', and even a stellar ensemble cast cannot make 'The Thursday Murder Club' work. But 'Sorry, Baby' is a stunning debut

- Clarisse Loughrey

Stephen King and writer-director Mike Flanagan, of Netflix hits such as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, are an ideal match. Both possess monstrous imaginations and pure hearts, tending towards horror with an ability to imagine a better future. Flanagan's touched many of the greats - Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe - in his horror series. But when he collides with King, in Gerald's Game (2017), The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2019), and, now, The Life of Chuck, it's like watching two people speak with the same voice.

The Life of Chuck is reverentially faithful to King's novella, published in his 2020 collection If It Bleeds. And, admittedly, those particularly infatuated by either his or Flanagan's work will likely find themselves richly rewarded by the film. But it also loses out on one of the most thrilling aspects of adaptation - the sense of one artist wrestling with another's ideas, trying to make sense of them in their own language and, in turn, sparking a kind of combative electricity.

That's what made Stanley Kubrick's The Shining a masterpiece, whatever King's own objections to it might be. The Life of Chuck goes down too smooth and too easy for a story that's already one of King's most unabashedly sentimental works, venturing into that rather unpleasant territory we call “treacly”.

It was always the danger for an idea King first had when he was struck with a sudden thought while watching a busker beat out a tune on a few overturned plastic buckets: what if a businessman were to suddenly drop his briefcase and dance?