The People Choose The Life of Chuck

IndieWire’s Harrison Richlin notes that twelve of the past fourteen People’s Choice winners were nominated for Best Picture Oscars—and four won (The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book, and Nomadland). When the ticket-stub ballots cast by this year’s Toronto attendees were counted, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of the Stephen King novella published in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds, came out on top.

Flanagan’s first King adaptation, Gerald’s Game (2017), was generally well-received—in Variety, Joe Leydon called it “an arrestingly and sometimes excruciatingly suspenseful psychological thriller”—but his second, Doctor Sleep (2019), was docked for straining too hard to pull King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining (1977) into what Flanagan called “the cinematic universe” that Stanley Kubrick created in 1980. Critics have been kinder to the series Flanagan has created for Netflix, especially The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Midnight Mass (2021), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).

Like King’s novella, The Life of Chuck is divided into three chapters presented in reverse chronological order. In Act 3, the world is ending. California is drifting off into the Pacific, people are offing themselves, and the internet and cell service keep blinking out. And yet ads appear everywhere, even on TVs that have long gone dark: “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” No one, including a puzzled high-school teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex (Karen Gillan), has any idea who Chuck might be.

But there he is in Act 2, Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) dancing with a stranger (Annalise Basso), and in Act 1, young Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) discovers a secret. At the Film Stage, C. J. Prince finds that it’s all leading to “a grand statement on how people should make the most of their time on Earth and that our finite existence is only wasted when we fret about the inevitability of death. It’s a simple message, one Flanagan tells with full-throated sincerity, and none of which rings true.”

For Siddhant Adlakha at Variety, The Life of Chuck is “filled with delights, from wild tonal shifts between horror and naked sentimentality that work with surprising precision, to a litany of fun supporting characters played by Flanagan regulars, and a general rejection of cynicism even in the face of despondency. But any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand.”

At IndieWire, Katie Rife notes that the story hinges on three lines from Walt Whitman’s immortal “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Rife writes: “As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them.” The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager suggests that, like King and Flanagan’s “ambulatory protagonists, The Life of Chuck walks a fine line in search of poignancy, and despite stumbling every now and again, it quickly rights itself with earnest, affecting aplomb.”

The first and second runners-up for the People’s Choice Award were big winners in Cannes, where Jacques Audiard’s drug cartel musical Emilia Pérez won the Jury Prize and Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz shared the award for Best Actress. Sean Baker’s Anora took home the Palme d’Or, and both films are now heading to the New York Film Festival.

The People’s Choice Documentary Award went to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, a four-part series directed by Mike Downie, the brother of the Canadian band’s late lead singer and songwriter. “The place of honor that [Gord] Downie occupies in Canada’s national imagination has no parallel in the United States,” wrote Simon Vozick-Levinson in the New York Times when Downie passed away in 2017. “Imagine Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Michael Stipe combined into one sensitive, oblique poet-philosopher, and you’re getting close.”

Voted first runner-up was Will & Harper, directed by Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar). Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, a close friend, former SNL writer, and frequent collaborator who’s recently transitioned, hit the road. “There are enough earned moments of piercing sadness and shaggy humor that those that feel more engineered can distract,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee. “The bigger flourishes will surely help it to reach and educate a wider audience, and they don’t all misfire, but Will & Harper is best when it feels and looks smaller, the intimate story of two friends trying to navigate their way through something together without the assurance of a Hollywood ending.”

Writing for CBC, Ali Weinstein cites Frederick Wiseman and Allan King as lodestars during the making of Your Tomorrow, the second runner-up. Her observational documentary is a portrait of Ontario Place, a public park in Toronto on the verge of redevelopment.

Dispatching to Filmmaker from Cannes, where Coralie Fargeat won the award for Best Screenplay for The Substance, Blake Williams called the film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley “a vacant, barely-written rage against the entertainment industry’s feminine beauty standards that I might have hated if the film weren’t laughing at itself as much as I was.” Audiences are clearly getting a kick out of Sunday’s winner of the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award.

The first runner-up was Dead Talents Society, John Hsu’s comedy about a recently deceased teen who aims to score a “haunter’s license,” and the second runner-up, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, makes Adam Nayman’s list of TIFF 2024 favorites at the Ringer: “It’s high praise to say that the film—which pairs [Tim] Robinson with Paul Rudd as neighbors whose efforts at bro-ing out together have increasingly calamitous consequences—feels like an extended episode of I Think You Should Leave, strip-mining a similar vein of beta-male psychodrama in ways that split the difference between blatancy and sophistication.”

Toronto’s Platform competition was founded in 2015 and named after Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film. This year’s jury—Atom Egoyan, Hur Jin-ho, and Jane Schoenbrun—awarded the prize to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s They Will Be Dust, an ensemble drama about death that moves from one modern dance number to the next. Cineuropa’s Olivia Popp finds that the film “goes for broke in all its sincerity and quirkiness—and succeeds.” The jury also gave an honorable mention, citing “the exceptional artistry of Sylvia Chang’s brilliant and extremely multilayered portrayal of a conflicted mother in Huang Xi’s film Daughter’s Daughter.”

Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, the story of a Montréal copywriter who ditches it all to herd sheep in the French Alps, won the award for Best Canadian Feature, and Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, which reimagines a Canada where Persian and French are the official languages, won the Best Canadian Discovery Award. The winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award in Cannes, Universal Language is now Canada’s candidate for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

“It feels discombobulating,” says Rankin. “I come from the sub-earthly, subhuman realm of independent cinema down in the trenches of Winnipeg. So it’s very strange to be evaluated on such a high level and to be in such a spotlight.” The next stops on the festival circuit for Universal Language include New York and London, the two hubs of the second phase of the fall festival season. If you’re looking to catch up with the first, load up conversations with several terrific critics that Nicolas Rapold recorded in Venice and that Film Comment’s Devika Girish moderated in Toronto.