Mike Flanagan is not only one of our finest living horror directors, but has also proved, with Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2009), a sensitive adaptor of Stephen King. These two interests intersect with his latest tripartite feature, which begins near the end of its narrative – and of the world, and indeed of the universe. As a middle-school maths teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) observes the unfolding apocalypse while being mystified by the ubiquitous appearance of the message “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” across media, the question of who Chuck is will be answered in the film’s second and third chapters (chronologically its second and first parts, for this is a story told in reverse order), where Chuck is played variously by Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak and Cody Flanagan. Chuck is revealed to be an ordinary, extraordinary boy/man who skips through devastating loss, who contains multitudes, and whose life has been divided between the rigid literalness of maths and the fluid poetry of dance.
Although its eschatological preoccupations, haunted house and occasional ghosts (from the future rather than the past) ally it with horror, this is more a portrait of our place in a cosmos whose very materiality is not just confined to our experience of it, but also malleable to our minds. The world is, after all, what we make of it – and Flanagan pulls off the miracle of building Chuck’s (and his own) world with a heady mix of solicitude and sentiment, anxiety and awe, so that a film very much focused on death (of an individual, of all things) is also somehow a wondrous celebration of (a) life. This is the essence of bittersweetness, bottled and aged 39 years – and Flanagan’s keen eye for visual coding and choreographed splendour ensures that this retains its angsty charm to the end. Meanwhile there is something welcome but disarming, especially today, about the Capra-esque goodness and decency of all the major characters here, in a film that, despite its dark themes, simply refuses to be cynical.
strap: Mike Flanagan’s bittersweetly apocalyptic Stephen King adaptation dances a life backwards to the beginning (of the end)
© Anton Bitel
